Dr. Monson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) in the Precision Immunology Institute at the Tisch Cancer Institute. With her background in translational research and molecular epidemiology, she aims to further our understanding of tumor/immune interactions to improve immunotherapy (IO) treatment outcomes. Her PhD research combined molecular biology, bioinformatics, and biostatistics to define germline genomic biomarkers for IO-treated melanoma patients. As a postdoc, Dr. Monson is expanding on this work by integrating complex tumor-immune tissue profiling from IO-treated patients. Following her undergraduate work in synthetic organometallic chemistry, her passion for molecular oncology developed in the Early Drug Development Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center. Working on first-in-human clinical trials where treatments were determined not by the location of the primary tumor but by its molecular landscape showed her the power of harnessing genetic alterations to combat cancer. This work further inspired her to understand differences in cancer outcomes unexplained by tumor characteristics, and she obtained my Master’s in Epidemiology at Columbia University while working full-time at MSK. Dr. Monson’s thesis research (Monson et al. 2020) explored circulating biomarkers interacting synergistically with genetic risk factors and identified a biomarker for elevated breast cancer risk in genetically susceptible women. Her doctoral research at NYU, under the mentorship of Dr. Tomas Kirchhoff, aimed to improve patient outcomes and understand how inherited mechanisms of T cell regulation affect response to immune-targeting therapies. Dr. Monson’s dissertation research, funded by an NCI F99/K00 fellowship, defined a genomic signature predicting anti-PD1 IO resistance in melanoma. These results (Monson, Ferguson, et al. in revision) hold the potential to improve treatment recommendations and guide future exploration of the molecular processes driving IO response. At ISMMS, mentored by Drs. Dmitriy Zamarin, Miriam Merad, and Brian Brown, she is exploring tumorimmune interactions associated with IO outcomes in gynecological cancers. This proposal builds on her existing project employing samples from the NCI-sponsored NRG-GY003 clinical trial, for which Dr. Zamarin is the clinical and translational PI. The proposed work, correlating high-resolution spatial profiling of the ovarian cancer tumor microenvironment with IO outcomes, integrates her understanding of tumor “omics” gained at MSK with her knowledge of immuno-oncology from her PhD. By understanding the complex tumor-immune landscape of IO-treated ovarian cancer patients, this project has the potential to answer crucial questions that simultaneously improve patient outcomes while furthering our understanding of the mechanisms underlying IO outcomes.
Dr. Monson’s study titled High-resolution spatial profiling of ovarian cancer tumors to predict immunotherapy outcomes aims to:
- Profile immune microenvironment composition and define spatial relationships between cell subtypes in OC tumors as biomarkers of ICI response.
- Characterize the spatially resolved transcriptional signatures of the TME of ICI-treated OC patients and assess their association with treatment outcomes.
ConduITS is supported by NCATS of the NIH’s CTSA Program. Any use of CTSA-supported resources requires citation of grant number UL1TR004419 awarded to ISMMS in the acknowledgment section of every publication resulting from this support. Adherence to the NIH Public Access Policy is also required.
