Max Krummel

Dr. Krummel is a Professor and the Robert E. Smith Endowed Chair in Experimental Pathology at UCSF. He studies mechanisms that regulate T cell response and immune function, using cutting-edge real-time imaging methods. As a graduate student, he developed expertise in the generation and use of monoclonal antibodies targeted to costimulatory and inhibitory molecules on T cells. He generated antibodies to CTLA-4, which identified an inhibitory pathway of T cell regulation and also could be used to trigger or block that pathway. This approach led to the development of human antibodies of the same type, a therapy now named ‘ipilimumab’, now FDA approved and widely used for treatment of melanoma and other cancers. Dr. Krummel’s lab now focuses on figuring out how immune systems, collections of cells in complex tissues, work. The use of fluorescent proteins and real-time imaging enable the examination of information processing by the immune system. These approaches reveal how motile immune cells ‘search’ their environment for critical information and characterize specific phagocytes in the tumor microenvironments as primary players in transmitting signals to lymphocytes and regulating disease outcome. Dr. Krummel earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley and did postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia.