Daniel S. Chen (Daniel Chen) is an M.D. Ph.D. Translational Scientist and Medical Oncologist specializing in Malignant Melanoma and Immunotherapy.
He is best known for developing the Cellular Microarray, in collaboration with Yoav Soen, while working with Mark Davis at Stanford University Medical Center. Cellular microarrays, are biological chips that allow interrogation of living cells on the surface of a solid support. The chips, spotted with varying materials, such as antibodies, proteins, or lipids, can interact with the cells, leading to their capture on specific spots. Combinations of different materials can be spotted in a given area, allowing not only cellular capture, when a specific interaction exists, but also the triggering of a cellular response, change in phenotype, or detection of a response from the cell, such as a specific secreted factor.
The cellular microarrays were first designed to detect, in a high throughput fashion, what immune systems could "see." By spotting different peptide-MHC complexes on the surface of the microarrays (pMHC Cellular Microarrays), T cells that recognized different targets could be detected in a rapid fashion (Soen, Y, Chen, DS (co-first author), Kraft, DL, Davis, MM, Brown, PO. Detection and Characterization of Cellular Immune Responses Using Peptide-MHC Microarrays. PLoS Biol, 2003, 1(3):429-438.). T cells from patients with Malignant Melanoma that had generated strong cellular immune responses following Melanoma peptide vaccination were noted to have very different functional profiles, demonstrating the variability in human immune responses (Chen DS, Davis MM. Cellular immunotherapy: Antigen recognition is just the beginning. Springer Semin. Immuno, 2005, 27(1):119-127.). Patients that developed polyfunctional Melanoma antigen specific T cells, particularly ones that actively secreted IFN-gamma and TNF-alpha in response to antigen recognition, appeared to be associated with improved clinical outcomes in the initial studies (Chen DS, Soen, Y, Stuge, TB, Lee, PP, Weber, JS, Brown, PO, Davis, MM. Marked Differences in Human Melanoma Antigen-Specific T Cell Responsiveness Following Peptide Vaccination Using a Functional Microarray. PloS Med, 2005.). These studies have both defined a novel method for understanding human immune responses, and demonstrated the complexities of these responses in individuals.
Further applications developed on the cellular microarray included profiling of tumor samples and inflammatory responses in patients with coronary artery disease.