Anna Tocheva, PhD

Anna S. Tocheva, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Genetic and Genomic Sciences and a member of the Precision Immunology Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. During her training, she studied the repertoire of human iNKT cells and the structural determinants of CD1-lipid antigen presentation. She completed her postdoctoral studies in Columbia University Medical Center where she used quantitative phophoproteomics to map the signaling pathways triggered by the inhibitory receptor PD-1.
The Tocheva lab integrates cellular and molecular immunological assays with high-throughput proteomic and genomic approaches to study the repertoire and function of human tumor-specific T cells with a special interest in CD1/lipid-restricted T cells. To achieve personalized view of each patient’s tumor-immune microenvironment interactions and responses to therapy, her laboratory develops patient-derived 3D organoid-T cell co-culture models. The overall goal of the lab is to use these patient-derived models to understand the role of different T cell populations in tumor immunity and how we can harness their properties in cancer immunotherapies.