News & Fun
2026 Spring
Selective Impact on Regulatory T cells by IL02 Mutein
Mar 2026
New paper out in American Journal of Transplantation in collaboration with the Jean Kwun lab (Duke)🚀. Huge shoutout to Nolan and Joshua for pushing this forward.
We show that the IL-2 mutein VIS171 doesn’t just expand Tregs—it reshapes them, uncovering surprising heterogeneity across Treg subsets while preserving strong function. Excited to take this into the transplantation space and start thinking about how to program Treg states for tolerance.
Atlas-guided discovery of transcription factors for T cell programming
Feb 4 2026
Thrilled to share our lab’s latest paper in Nature! 🚀
In this work, we present an atlas that offers a blueprint for precise T-cell engineering — enabling the design of T cells that remove exhaustion-specific switches, retain potent cancer-killing activity, and preserve durable protection. This brings us one step closer to smarter, more effective immunotherapies.
Latent Regulatory Programs Generate Synthetic T Cell States with Enhanced Therapeutic Potential
Jan 8 2026
We’re excited to share our latest study on bioRxiv, in collaboration with the Justin Milner lab (UNC).
What happens if you push transcription factors beyond their natural limits in CD8⁺ T cells? This work shows that gain-of-function screening can uncover hidden immune programs — and opens new paths to engineer more powerful T cells.
2025 Winter
New members!
Welcome Nick and Lucas!
Holiday Party!
2025 Fall
New members!
Welcome Xiabing!
2025 Summer
Kay’s KOGO presentation
2025 Spring
New members!
March 10, 2025. Nolan Brown, Ph.D. in Genetics and Molecular Biology at UNC-Chapel Hill joined the lab.
Feb 3, 2025. Brilliant research technician Fiona from UNC and exchange student Xiaoyuan from the University of Hong Kong joined the lab!
Emily, with fantastic experience in tumor immunology from NCI, started her rotation in the Chung lab!
Welcome, Nolan, Fiona, Emily and Xiaoyuan!!
2024 Winter
The First Christmas of the Chung lab at Lineberger!
December 25, 2025. Christmas door decorations with our favorite tropical theme! Huge thanks to everyone who has been part of this journey! Happy Holidays, and cheers to an even better year ahead!
New members!
Ashley and Anna, amazing 1st year UNC BBSP PhD students, joined us for rotations.
Super talented undergraduates Kayden in biology and Moiz in Physics & Economics joined the lab. Welcome!!
Celebrating the holiday season and the lab lunch!
December 3, 2024. It’s that wonderful time of year again! We just wrapped up the celebrations: the holiday spirit anlab’s lab’s very first Christmas. As we enjoyed some delicious food and shared lively conversationcouldn’tuldn’t help but reminisce about our journey together. This past year has been incredible, all thanks to our dedicated and hardworking It’s. It’s been an amazing first year, and we are excited about the journey. Here’s to many more discoveries, milestones, and, of course, more lab lunches!
2024 Fall
Kay’s Cytokine 2024 presentation
Oct 19, 2024. Kay presented “The landscape of transcription factors driving context-dependent CD8+ T cell state programming” at Cytokine 2024.
2024 Summer
An incredible team has started to assemble!
June 3, 2024. Fantastic UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduate students Zaid, Ava, Li, and Daniel joined the lab. Welcome our wonderful first rotation student, Violet, from the UNC BBSP PhD program, to join us for the summer!
2024 Spring- Chung lab officially started at Linberger Building UNC Chapel Hill!
The first cell culture in the Chung lab🧫
March 20, 2024. The Chung lab TC room is fully up and running! The first batch of cell culture is ongoing. 🧫Our new TC hoods, biosafety cabinet, and ergonomic chairs! 🧪Well-organized plastics and reagents. So satisfying!!! ⚙️Super fancy touch screen temperature-controlled Eppendorf centrifuge!
Big unpacking day💪
February 14, 2024. Emma, Matt, and Kay rolled up their sleeves and unboxed so many reagents, prepping for cool science 😀
Chung lab officially started!
January 31, 2024.
Struck gold in recruiting Matt as Chung lab manager!
