Physician-scientist L Benjamin Hills will work to study immune cells in young cancer patients, who are susceptible to infectious diseases during treatment.

La Jolla Institute for Immunology physician-scientist L Benjamin Hills, MD, PhD, has won the Cancer Research Institute’s prestigious Irvington Postdoctoral Fellowship to study immune cells in young cancer patients.

Hills, a member of LJI’s Crotty Lab and pediatric oncology fellow at UC San Diego School of Medicine who treats patients at Rady Children’s Hospital, will use the three-year, $243,000 fellowship to investigate how the immune system changes over the course of cancer treatment and how doctors can keep patients as healthy as possible.

“The leading cause of mortality in our patients, outside of cancer relapse, is infectious disease,” Hills said in a press release.

Hills will work with a group of pediatric oncology patients receiving care at Rady Children’s. To study their immune cells, Hills will use a nasal swabbing technique originally developed in the Crotty Lab at LJI that showed nasal swabs can capture large numbers of immune cells residing in a person’s upper airway.

Hills plans to swab pediatric cancer patients at the time of diagnosis and during and after cancer treatment, isolating immune cells to study how they might change over the course of each patient’s treatment.

Hills hopes his work will guide clinical care including vaccine schedules, often interrupted by cancer treatment.

“We need the best evidence possible to support vaccine timing recommendations for these patients,” said Hills. “When might these patients actually be able to mount immune responses to vaccines, and when are they going to be most susceptible to infections?”

With the Cancer Research Institute award, Hills can track immune cell responses to vaccines and get a clearer picture of patient health.