Melissa Quino Reeves, Ph.D.

Melissa Reeves earned her PhD from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) where she studied tumor heterogeneity and clonal evolution of skin tumors from benign to malignant to metastatic stages. She received the prestigious Sandler Fellowship to start her own independent lab at UCSF in 2017, studying how tumor heterogeneity impacts the way the immune system responds to cancer. The Reeves Lab moved to the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah in 2022.

Research Statement

The Reeves Lab studies tumor heterogeneity and how it impacts the immune response to cancer. We have established a powerful novel system to model tumor heterogeneity in vivo, in which we can establish and modulate heterogeneous tumors made up of multiple, fluorescently-labeled tumor populations. Using the fluorescent labels, we can track each population within the tumor to study how heterogeneity shapes the spatial organization of immune cells and immune activity within a tumor. We are also investigating the impact of neoantigen heterogeneity—which arises from mutation heterogeneity—on the anti-tumor T cell response, and tumor evolution following immunotherapy.