Chiang Lab
Welcome
The Chiang Lab is a multi-disciplinary group in the Department of Radiological Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Our clinical work uses minimally-invasive image-guided therapy to treat solid tumors. This critical link to patient care means our lab projects are highly translational in nature with the end goal of impacting clinical medicine. We use wet-lab and engineering approaches to address current limitations of image-guided therapy and aim to advance future developments in precision medicine.
News
May 20, 2025
Undergraduates Aravinth Ruppa, Veronica Hankil, and Hannah Mirmohammadi for their excellent posters that were presented at the Undergraduate Research Week Symposium. Their research highlights the exciting breadth of our work in minimally invasive cancer diagnosis and therapy.
Aravinth Ruppa - Microbubbles enable Site-Specific Binding to GPC3 Positive Hepatoma Cells
Veronica Hankil - Tumor-to-Normal Ratio and Microsphere Density Impact on Progression-Free Survival After Yttrium-90 Radioembolization
Hannah Mirmohammadi - Clinically-Relevant Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide Nanoparticle-Loading of Primary Natural Killer Cell-Based Immunotherapy
February 15, 2025
We were recently awarded the UCLA OPSCD Bridge Grant entitled "Accelerating clinical translation of site-specific antibody-labeling microbubbles" - Let's go!
December 1, 2025
Welcome Yong to our lab! He brings in breadth of experience in epigenetics of cancer to our group
November 12, 2024
Cathy Chen has won the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center travel award for her upcoming talk at the Radological Society of North America (RSNA) titled “NK Cell Infusion Enhances Tumor Control after Ablation-associated Sub-lethal Hyperthermia in vitro and in vivo: Implications of MHC-I shedding"
June 27, 2024
Our lab was just awarded a UCLA CTSI Core Voucher for the project "High-Dimensional Immune Profiling using CyTOF to characterize the effect of locoregional therapy on an Oncopig Liver Tumor Model." We will be working with the JCCC Flow Cytometry Core to build this new platform for pig immune analysis.
May 8, 2024
Congratulations to our medical student Tu Nguyen for being award the RSNA Research and Education Foundation's Medical Student grant, titled "Correlating pre-ablation metabolic signatures with post-ablation recurrence in HCC". Many future publications and grants coming out of this project!
March 24, 2024
Thermal ablation with NK-cell based immunotherapy may improve HCC outcomes
While thermal ablation currently provides excellent outcomes for early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a new study indicates that applying nonlethal hyperthermia may also improve natural killer (NK) cell cytotoxicity and effect better outcomes for multiple HCC cell lines.
Cathy Chen's work on NK cell therapy was presented at the 2024 SIR meeting and profiled in the SIR newsletter. Great work Cathy!
November 26, 2023
RSNA abstracts were successfully presented, and congrats to Abi for being awarded the RSNA Trainee Research Prize
October 26, 2023
Characterizing hepatocellular carcinoma stem markers and their corresponding susceptibility to NK-cell based immunotherapy
Hot off the press! Our paper on HCC stem cell was published in Frontiers of Immunology
June 10, 2023
Our RSNA Research Scholar grant "Augmenting Microwave Ablation with Supercharged NK cells in an Oncopig Liver Tumor Model" was just awarded! Thank you RSNA for funding this important work that will accelerate IR's role in developing next generation cell-based immunotherapies.
September, 2022
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