Anthony Cillo, PhD profile page

Dr. Anthony Cillo is an assistant professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and a member of UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, the Center for Systems Immunology, the Tumor Microenvironment Center, and the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program. His laboratory studies how immune cell states, intercellular communication, and spatial organization shape antitumor immunity in the tumor microenvironment.

Dr. Cillo’s work integrates single-cell and spatial genomics, multiplex tissue imaging, computational modeling, and experimental perturbation systems to understand how cellular communities in tumors emerge, persist, and respond to therapy. During his postdoctoral training, he developed and applied single-cell transcriptomic approaches to define the immune landscapes of solid tumors, including head and neck cancer, melanoma, breast cancer, and pediatric sarcomas. This work contributed to new insights into tumor-immune interactions, tertiary lymphoid structures, and mechanisms of response and resistance to immunotherapy.

The Cillo Lab now combines translational studies of patient tumors with mechanistic model systems and computational tool development. Current areas of focus include defining how tumor neighborhoods regulate T cell infiltration, identifying cellular communication programs that shape immune suppression or immune activation, and developing computational approaches to model cell fate and intercellular signaling from single-cell and spatial datasets. Through this work, Dr. Cillo’s lab aims to uncover why current immunotherapies fail in some patients and to identify new strategies to promote effective antitumor immune responses.