Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Sandro Santagata is an Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where he is a neuropathologist. He is a member of the Ludwig Center at Harvard and the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science, and is the Associate Director of the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology (LSP) at Harvard Medical School (HMS). His research laboratory at BWH and the HMS LSP develops and implements methodologies to image tissues resected from cancer patients, extracting molecular information that sheds light on how cancers form and then develop their most aggressive features. With these technologies, his group investigates the biological properties of cancer tissues, the molecular systems tumor cells use to evade immune surveillance, and the ways that cancer and immune cells assemble into dynamic ecosystems with emergent properties. This rich imaging data is being made available in the form of interactive tumor atlases as part of the National Cancer Institute’s Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN), a consortium which is assembling 2D and 3D maps of human precancers and cancers which can be browsed and analyzed by users for research and clinical practice, to advance our understanding of cancer and to find new treatments.