Akil Merchant, MD, is an NIH funded physician-scientist who focuses on developing new treatments for blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. In particular, he studies how interactions between tumor cells, cancer stem cells and the tumor immune microenvironment can drive the progression of tumors and resistance to chemotherapies.
Dr. Merchant is a leader in applying imaging mass cytometry (IMC) to the study of the tumor immune microenvironment and is the founding director of the IMC Shared Resources Core at Cedars-Sinai. IMC is a novel imaging technology that allows for the simultaneous measurement of over 40 proteins in a single slice of tissue, at single cell resolution.
Ultimately our goal is better understand the immune response to cancer so we can predict which patients will respond to treatment with immuno-oncology drugs and identify new immuno-oncology targets in the future.