Dr. Qizhi Tang

Professor of Surgery, Division of Transplant Surgery, UCSF

Research

Dr. Tang has 20 years’ experiences in type 1 diabetes research in preclinical models and early phase clinical trials. Her lab has two main areas of research: one promoting immune tolerance using Treg cell therapy in type 1 diabetes and transplantation, and another one on beta cell replacement therapy in type 1 diabetes. In Project 1, she will work closely with Dr. Bluestone and others on identify highly islet‐antigen reactive TCRs from pancreas tissue with the goal to use TCRs to redirect Tregs to islets to stall immune attack of the islet. For this effort, her lab has established technology to screen for TCR reactivity, expressing TCRs in Tregs, and assessing Treg function in vitro and in preclinical models. She will also work closely with Drs. Hebrok and Parent to design approaches to engineer stem cell derived beta cells to investigate autoimmune targets of islets. In collaboration with Drs. Bluestone and Vo, her team will engineer autoreactive T cells. She will supervise constructing humanized mouse models to test human immune cell interaction with transplanted islets and stem‐cell‐derived beta cells.