Susan Kaech

Susan Kaech demonstrated that metabolic insufficiency is a primary driver of CD8 T cell exhaustion in chronic viral infection and cancer, showing that exhausted T cells have impaired mitochondrial function, reduced oxidative phosphorylation, and epigenetic scarring at metabolic gene loci that persists even after checkpoint blockade. Her work on the metabolic-epigenetic axis of T cell exhaustion revealed that metabolic reprogramming must precede or accompany checkpoint immunotherapy to fully reinvigorate anti-tumor T cell responses. She develops combination strategies pairing metabolic enhancers with checkpoint inhibitors to achieve durable T cell reinvigoration in cancer patients.