Landon J. Edgar, Ph.D.

Landon is a chemical immunologist with expertise in single cell analysis technologies. He completed both a BSc (chemistry and pharmacology, 2011) and PhD (chemistry, 2016) at the University of Toronto. As a graduate student, Landon was a member of an interdisciplinary team that developed a series of chemical probes that enabled visualization of how cancer cells ‘breathe’ within a solid tumour. This technology allowed scientists to evaluate which individual cancer cells were potentially the most dangerous.

Following graduate school, Landon engaged in postdoctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute in California. Here, he used technologies from a range of disciplines to probe the mechanisms through which immune cells communicate. This research resulted in the discovery that specific types of sugars on the surface of immune cells control how these cells recognize viruses and foreign proteins.

Landon is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology at the University of Toronto. Here, his interdisciplinary team is harnessing methods from immunology, chemistry, and biochemistry to study and manipulate the immune system, with a specific focus on the roles of carbohydrates in health and disease. The lab’s broad research vision is to program synthetic immune responses by engineering the surfaces of immune cells. Technologies produced by the Edgar lab will provide the foundation for next-generation therapeutics that will benefit patients suffering from a variety of diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes.