Dr. Cheng completed his doctoral and the first post-doctoral training at Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) with Dr. Evan Newell, the pioneer in the use of highly multiplexed combinatorial peptide-MHC tetramer technology and mass cytometry to examine human antigen-specific T cells in health and disease. He has focused his research in human chronic HBV infection and liver cancer, and developed unique expertise in studying low frequency antigen-specific T cell responses in human clinical samples, through a combination of highly multiplexed pMHC tetramer, mass cytometry, high-dimensional single-cell techniques and analytical methods. Dr. Cheng published his seminal works in journal such as Science Immunology and Immunity, where he simultaneously probed >500-1000 T cell epitopes in chronic HBV infected patients or HBV-associated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. He uncovered novel HBV-specific memory T cell responses and public HBV-reactive TCR clones associated with viral control in Asian population. Expanding his expertise toward HBV-associated HCC,  Dr. Cheng demonstrating the casual link between non-terminally exhausted HBV-specific tissue-resident memory CD8+ T cells in tumors and patient’s relapse-free survival. His work showed that HBV-specific T cells have effective anti-tumor response, implying that these cells could be harnessed for therapeutic purposes. This study is well-received by the scientific community, and featured by two commentary articles in Immunity and Cancer Discovery. Dr. Cheng also made substantial contributions in the fields of mass cytometry and high-dimensional data analysis (Newell & Cheng. Nature Immunology. 2016; Cheng & Newell. Adv in Immunology. 2016; Cheng et al. Journal of Immunology. 2016). Dr. Cheng is also actively involved in the international community of immunologists. He is currently serving as a member of organizing committee of Early Career Immunology (https://www.earlycareerimmunology.com/), a digital seminar series  that promotes emerging immunologists in their early career around the world.

Dr. Cheng aim to extend his expertise and the cutting-edge technology platforms to dissect human virus-specific T cells across different viral infections and immune-related diseases, and explore the relationship between the tissue residency of T cells and long-term immune protection. Our long-term goal is to translate T cell-based therapeutics for improving the clinical benefit of patients.

Human memory T cells are critical in controlling the immune protection upon vaccination, or during the progression of viral infection and virus-associated cancer. Current knowledge of human T cell biology has been often limited to the study of total T cell population without the understanding of antigen-specific immunity due to the lack of apparent T cell epitopes. In addition, most of the studies only investigate peripheral T cells without encompassing site-specific responses in human tissues, where the diseases usually occur. These prevent the accurate interpretation of disease-specific immune responses and restrain the therapeutic implications of findings. The Cheng Laboratory focuses on combining the usage of highly multiplexed combinatorial peptide-MHC tetramer staining, mass cytometry, single-cell multi-omics, T cell receptor sequencing, high-dimensional analysis, and spatial imaging, to dissect human virus-specific T cell responses residing in the diseased tissues in great detail. We are particularly interested in the immune responses of virus-specific T cells in SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and infection, chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and HBV-associated liver diseases,  and human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cancers.