WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Professor Marie-Liesse Labat

Sunny Wu, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow – Computational Biology Medicine & Immunology Discovery, Genentech, South San Francisco, CA, USA

Immune supportive functions of fibroblasts in tissues and tumors: A dual-edged sword for targeted therapy

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday

Including Q&A session
 

Sunny Wu, PhD is a joint computational and experimental postdoctoral fellow in the Discovery Immunology, Oncology, and Computational Biology departments at Genentech in South San Francisco. His research focuses on how stromal cells, particularly fibroblasts, actively regulate immune cell function across lymphoid tissues, barrier organs, and tumors.

Prior to joining Genentech, Dr Wu completed his PhD at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, where he led a seminal study published in Nature Genetics that defined the cellular and spatial organization of human primary breast cancers using single-cell and spatial genomics.

 

In this seminar, Dr Wu will present recent and ongoing work uncovering previously unrecognized fibroblast-driven immune niches. This includes a recent Nature Immunology study demonstrating how lymph node fibroblasts sustain dendritic cell homeostasis via FLT3L, a forthcoming Nature Immunology paper describing a fibroblast–macrophage axis that maintains skin tissue integrity through CSF-1 signaling, and unpublished work revealing how fibroblasts promote T cell survival and tissue residency via isoform-specific TGF-β signaling. Together, these studies highlight how stromal cells exert context-dependent immune-supportive and immunosuppressive functions, with important implications for precision therapeutic targeting in oncology.

All welcome!