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Josephine Taverna | UT Health San Antonio

Contact

tavernaj@uthscsa.edu

Departments & Divisions

Institutes & Centers

Josephine A Taverna, MD

Associate Professor

Dr. Josephine Taverna is a faculty member in the Division of Hematology and Oncology. She holds a joint appointment with the Department of Medicine and Department of Molecular Medicine. She attended Yale University and majored in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and received her medical degree from Mount Sinai School of Medicine.  Dr. Taverna completed her Hematology-Oncology & Cancer Prevention fellowships at the University of Arizona. In 2017, she graduated from the Advanced Drug Development fellowship at UT Health Science Center at San Antonio.  She completed a NIH/Lilly externship in February 2018 where she collaborated with the Pharmacometrics team at Lilly and helped to develop a quantitative systems pharmacology mathematical model to aid in therapeutic discovery. Dr. Taverna is a physician-scientist who has been testing novel drugs in patient derived organoids and humanized mouse models of lung cancer. In her laboratory, she is using single-cell omics to study complex crosstalk of oncogenic signaling that engenders hybrid epithelial-mesenchymal transition, an emerging concept in tumor metastasis and drug-resistance (Taverna et a. Cancer Research 2020). Her research team discovered that AXL-STAT3 signaling in the tumor microenvironment promotes hybrid EMT states in lung cancer cells, promotes M2 polarization and macrophage plasticity, enhances protumorigenic remodeling of stromal fibroblasts and promotes the recruitment of supportive host cells (e.g., macrophages, stromal fibroblasts and endothelial cells and other immune cells) that support metastatic tumor niches.