Jeffrey Rathmell

Jeffrey Rathmell demonstrated that glucose transporter GLUT1 expression is essential for effector T cell function and that regulatory T cells preferentially use oxidative metabolism, revealing that metabolic programming enforces the balance between anti-tumor effector and immunosuppressive regulatory T cell responses. His development of metabolic profiling tools for clinical immune monitoring enabled identification of T cell metabolic fitness as a biomarker predicting checkpoint immunotherapy response. His work on metabolic reprogramming of exhausted tumor-infiltrating T cells showed that providing metabolic substrates can partially rescue anti-tumor function independent of checkpoint blockade.