2020
OCTOBER 2020: Payne lab has grown! We celebrated with a physically-distanced, socially-connected hike to Hawk Mountain to welcome to all the new members who joined the Payne lab this fall, and bid farewell to Jimmy Tarrant, DVM, who will be joining the Gene Therapy Program at Penn:
- Damian Maseda, PhD (Senior Research Investigator): DSG3-CAART translational studies, humanized mouse models for cellular immunotherapy, and comparative immunology of canine and human cellular immunotherapies
- Britt Levy, DVM (COHA fellow and newly minted fellow of the AVCD): comparative immunology of human and canine pemphigus and canine CAART therapy
- Casey Lee (MD-PhD student, immunology): single cell CAART profiling and regulatory pathways for CAART differentiation
- Emma Goodman (rotating PhD student, immunology): canine cellular immunotherapy

Many thanks to 2017 Wharton grads Shabnam Eghbali, Sumun Khetpal, and Irene Park, who founded the non-profit organization Theia and interviewed me for their podcast episode on balancing academia and life sciences entrepreneurship, now online on Spotify and Medium
Sangwook presents his latest data on MuSK CAAR T cell development at the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation of America (MGFA) Scientific Session
AUGUST 2020: Jinmin’s paper reporting the definitive preclinical studies that supported the DSG3-CAART Investigational New Drug application is published in Journal of Clinical Investigation
JULY 2020:
COVID, racial justice, and the value of Penn’s international community have been the focus of many discussions over the last several months. I am grateful for our dedicated team that has maintained our essential research and phased return to lab during these challenging times. Virtual Payne (ViP) lab meetings have been a highlight of each week.
All the best to Daniel, who left Philadelphia to begin his graduate studies in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program
Christoph rejoins the lab to continue his work on novel cellular immunotherapy technologies and to better understand the pathophysiologic role of invariant T cell subsets in oncology, autoimmunity, and infection
Aimee is very sentimental about being promoted to Professor, 27 years after starting her MD-PhD training. This wouldn’t have been possible without her family, her mentors and colleagues at Stanford, Wash U, Penn and around the world, and her laboratory members past and present who supported her along the way. For all the physician-scientists in the pipeline or contemplating the career path, focus on your science, pick your battles, and hang in there – it’s absolutely worth the struggle!

FEBRUARY 2020: Napatra’s retrospective on the clinical outcomes of rituximab in pemphigoid is published in JAAD, paired with more detailed outcomes and discussion in a Mendeley supplemental dataset