Bitesize Episode 2 - Dr Tyler Miller

Dr Tyler Miller was one of our Future Leaders. Now a Junior Fellow, he manages a team of 12 at his own lab. 

Here he explains how this team is trying to figure out how to prevent our own immune cells from suppressing our immune system. Instead, he aims to turn part of a brain tumour's immune system - myeloid cells - into an effective army of immune agents that can both kill tumour cells and attract new recruits, like the T-cells Mat mentioned, to target the tumour.

You can read more about this here

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Transcript

MUSIC INTRO 

HOST: Welcome to the second bitesize episode of The Brain Tumour Charity’s podcast. My name’s Jo Porter and I’m the podcast producer and the charity’s PR Manager.  

In this episode you’ll find out about Dr Tyler Miller’s work. Tyler runs his own lab in Ohio. This explanation of what his team is working on was recorded at a webinar about immunology that we hosted in 2025.  

TYLER: My name is Doctor Tyler Miller. I'm a physician scientist here at University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.  

I've been part of the Charity’s network since 2020, about five years ago, when I was awarded the postdoctoral fellowship as part of the Future Leaders Grant Scheme. 

I was fortunate enough to not only get that funding but also to become one of the first Junior Fellows as part of the Future Leaders Scheme. And that support over the last five years has really transformed my ability to go from being a young researcher in somebody else's lab, studying brain tumours and immunotherapy into now having my own lab. 

So I started my lab here about 16 months ago and now I have about 12 people that are full time in my lab that are now studying brain tumours. And so you think about sort of the impact that that initial investment has had and the continued support from the Brain Tumour Charity has had on my lab and also brain tumour research in general. 

My lab and I really study how we make current immunotherapies more effective for brain tumour patients.  

There has been really great work and and breakthroughs in liquid tumours like leukaemia, lymphomas for immunotherapies, CAR T cell therapies and and others, but we haven't had that success in solid tumours and, and really in, in brain tumours at all. 

One of those reasons is that unlike leukaemias where you have a blood cancer, there is a tissue that surrounds a solid tumour, that surrounds the cancer in the brain, and that's full of other types of immune cells that we have to deal with.  

Many of our own immune cells can suppress the ability of our own immune system to target that cancer. The largest portion of those immune cells in a brain tumour are called myeloid cells or microglia. These cells have a really important role in both helping get rid of the tumour, but then the tumour sort of co-opts them and has them suppress the rest of the immune system from coming in. 

So our work is trying to figure out how do we take those myeloid cells, those microglia that are in the brain tumour and turn them back into effective immune agents that can both kill the tumour cell directly and also recruit other cells like T-cells into the tumour to target it. 

HOST: Thank you Tyler - and if you want more information about the research we fund, or need support or want to find out about the campaigning we do, please visit our website at the brain tumour charity dot org. Or follow us on social media. Thank you for listening and do leave a review so that other people find us.