Spatially Encoded Pathways for Immune Tolerance in Human Health and Disease

Michael Angelo, MD PhD is a board-certified pathologist in the department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Angelo is a leader in high dimensional imaging with expertise in tissue homeostasis, tumor immunology, and infectious disease. His lab has pioneered the construction and development of Multiplexed Ion Beam Imaging by time of flight (MIBI-TOF). MIBI-TOF uses secondary ion mass spectrometry and metal-tagged antibodies to achieve rapid, simultaneous imaging of dozens of proteins at subcellular resolution. His lab used this novel technology to discover previously unknown rule sets governing the spatial organization and cellular composition of immune and stromal cells within the tumor microenvironment in triple-negative breast cancer and ductal carcinoma in situ. This effort has led to ongoing work aimed to define broader structural mechanisms that promote tolerogenic niches in cancer, tuberculosis, and the maternal-fetal interface. His lab is expanding this spatial biology framework to leverage new technologies that can map the spatial distribution of transcripts, lipids, and glycans. In doing so, his goal is to enable a new era of anatomic pathology where single unified spatial representation can be used to discover regulatory pathways that can be targeted for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Dr. Angelo is the recipient of 2014 NIH Director’s Early Independence, 2020 DOD Era of Hope Award and is a principal investigator on multiple extramural awards from the National Cancer Institute, Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and co-director of the Human Biomolecular Atlas (HuBMAP) initiative.