Judith Agudo

Judith Agudo is an Assistant Professor of Immunology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University, focusing on immune privilege mechanisms in tissue-resident stem cells and cancer stem cells. Her work explores how stem cell populations evade immune surveillance and how cancer cells co-opt these mechanisms to escape immunotherapy.

• Developed the Jedi mouse model (Agudo et al., 2015) for antigen-specific immune studies
• Identified quiescence-dependent immune evasion via MHC-I downregulation in hair follicle and muscle stem cells
• Characterized Sox17-driven immune silencing in intestinal cancer precursors (Goto et al., 2024)
• Created PADME-seq for spatial tumor microenvironment analysis (Baldominos et al., 2022)

Her research spans stem cell immunology, cancer immune evasion, and regenerative medicine applications, with particular emphasis on T cell interactions with stem cell populations. Current projects investigate:

• Molecular pathways of immune privilege in quiescent stem cells
• Cancer stem cell niches that resist immunotherapy
• Developing immune-silent tissues for transplantation
• Metastatic cell immune escape outside primary tumors

Publications demonstrate expertise in MHC class I regulation, antigen presentation, and stem cell quiescence, with recent work analyzing immune suppression in ovarian cancer (2024) and stress signaling in breast cancer metastasis (2024). Her lab employs transgenic models, single-cell sequencing, and spatial transcriptomics to dissect tumor-immune interactions.