John Warrington

Program: Computational and Systems Biology

Current advisor: Nathan Singh, MD, MS

Undergraduate university: University of South Carolina, 2019

Enrollment year: 2021

Research summary
Engineering the immune system to fight cancer

My research interest lies in the ability to modulate the immune system to attack and kill cancer cells through computational and wet bench approaches.

In my first rotation, I worked in the lab of Nathan Singh where I engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells against Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. More specifically, I was looking at differences in antigen-independent (tonic) signaling between the CD28 and 4-1BB co-stimulatory domains in second generation CARs. This work resulted in two middle-author publications.

In my rotation with Maxim Artymov, I worked on an immune aging project where I computationally analyzed scRNA sequencing data that a postdoc had generated in the lab and identified several novel immune cell populations within the data.

For my final rotation, I will be working with Todd Fehniger where I will be working on engineering memory-like NK cells with CARs against specific tumor models.

Graduate publications
Selli ME, Landmann JH, Terekhova M, Lattin J, Heard A, Hsu YS, Chang TC, Chang J, Warrington J, Ha H, Kingston N, Hogg G, Slade M, Berrien-Elliott MM, Foster M, Kersting-Schadek S, Gruszczynska A, DeNardo D, Fehniger TA, Artyomov M, Singh N. 2023 Costimulatory domains direct distinct fates of CAR-driven T-cell dysfunction. Blood, 141(26):3153-3165. PMCID:

Heard A, Landmann JH, Hansen AR, Papadopolou A, Hsu YS, Selli ME, Warrington JM, Lattin J, Chang J, Ha H, Haug-Kroeper M, Doray B, Gill S, Ruella M, Hayer KE, Weitzman MD, Green AM, Fluhrer R, Singh N. 2022 Antigen glycosylation regulates efficacy of CAR T cells targeting CD19. Nat Commun, 13():3367. PMCID: PMC9188573

Heard A, Chang J, Warrington JM, Singh N. 2021 Advances in CAR design. Best Pract Res Clin Haematol, 34(3):101304