Science with a Purpose

Shannon Turley’s first scientific inspiration was Jacques Cousteau. As a child in suburban Chicago, she was so fascinated by the explorer’s films of undersea exploration that her mother enrolled her in a marine biology summer camp at the Shedd Aquarium. The program culminated in a weeklong research cruise off the Florida Keys with the first working ‘field’ scientists she had ever met. For the first time, Shannon realized that the dream she had fallen in love with through the small screen could be hers in real life.

“It just really cemented this idea that the life of a scientist is something very adventurous,” Shannon says. “The nature of what they were doing really resonated with me.”

This early experience sparked a lifelong fascination with scientific discovery and has influenced her entire professional career.

Making the Transition

As an aspiring marine biologist, when the time came for college, Shannon naturally wanted to be near the ocean. She went to the University of San Diego, where a series of human biology classes shifted her interest from the sea toward the molecular aspects of the biological world. As her interest grew, she decided to start working in a biochemistry lab, and really thrived doing basic research. When one of her colleagues mentioned a job opening at the prestigious Scripps Research Institute, she took it. Unwittingly, she ended up in the lab of Jonathan Sprent, one of the world’s foremost immunologists.

Shannon would go into Jonathan’s office to learn about classical immunology experiments, which he delivered while seated at his desk with his feet up, puffing on a pipe. His expansive knowledge and passion on the topic sparked Shannon’s own enthusiasm for immunology.

“I thought, ‘This is special. This isn’t something that happens every day.’”

Shannon went on to publish her first paper, on the protein sequence of a mouse ribosomal protein, at age 22 while working as a technician in another Scripps lab. Yet as the first person in her family to go to college, she had not seriously considered graduate school as an option. With the encouragement of mentors at Scripps, however, she ended up at Yale University. There she was excited to continue her work in immunology under the tutelage of Ira Mellman, along with her co-mentor Ralph Steinman at Rockefeller University, two preeminent leaders in the field.

As a graduate student, Shannon not only continued to excel in the lab, studying how dendritic cells initiate immune responses, but also discovered a love of teaching. “I thrived on interacting with and teaching students, in addition to all the exciting scientific research,” Shannon says. So when an opportunity to teach immunology at Bowdoin College came up as she was finishing her PhD, she jumped on it.

After a year at Bowdoin, however, her unceasing curiosity and love of basic research ultimately led her back to the lab, as a postdoctoral fellow at Joslin Diabetes Center. After completing her postdoc she took a position in 2004 as an assistant professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, where she continued to investigate dendritic cells, but now studied how their interactions with other immune cells play a role in diseases like diabetes and pancreatic cancer.

Shifting Motivations

Over the next ten years, Shannon built a successful career at Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School, and was promoted to associate professor in 2010. Her lab had become well-known for studying interactions between the immune system and the cells of the stroma, the connective tissue that supports organs and tumors. The research was relevant to a host of diseases, from cancer to autoimmune conditions, inflammation and fibrosis. In addition to her successes in the lab, she was able to sustain her love of teaching by serving as the Associate Director of the PhD Program in Immunology at Harvard Medical School.

Despite that success, Shannon felt restless. She loved the culture of academia and the freedom to pursue basic research, but wondered where else her scientific talent might take her.

It was then that she recalled the words of her PhD co-mentor Ralph Steinman, who had passed away from cancer in 2011. “You need to do work that is relevant to patients,” he told her not long before he died. “Be a good basic scientist, but think about how the biological questions you are asking will be relevant to people.”

Joining Genentech

Before her conversation with Ralph Steinman, the biotech industry wasn’t even on Shannon’s radar. Her growing interest in translating her research into treatments that could help people, however, shifted her perspective. So she jumped at the chance when her PhD mentor, Ira Mellman (who had joined Genentech in 2007) invited Shannon to come and give a talk.

“Genentech was just so unique compared to the other institutions I was considering. I recognized early that it was a really special opportunity, where I could actually be involved in trying to make cancer therapies for patients based on basic research.”

Shannon joined as a principal scientist in 2014, and is now a vice president and senior fellow in immunology and OMNI Biomarker Discovery. She enjoys how similar Genentech’s collegial, collaborative environment is to the scene she experienced and loved in academia. Most importantly, she has been able to continue teaching and training young scientists, several of whom have become successful, independent scientists continuing the work they started with her.

“I’m just doing for my trainees what senior scientists have done for me all along. I love interacting with scientists during their training years. Giving a hand to the next generation has always been rewarding.”

During her time here, Shannon’s lab has done seminal work studying the environment surrounding tumors and within lymphoid tissues where immune responses get started. In a collaborative effort spanning multiple Genentech teams, her group has found strong evidence that the tumor microenvironment plays a role in determining whether the immune system is able to respond to and attack cancer cells.

More specifically, her lab is investigating how certain cells in the space around tumors influence immunotherapy response. She and her colleagues have identified a series of cancer-associated fibroblasts, a particular cell type that can be associated with an impaired response to immunotherapy, and are trying to understand how targeting these cells could negate that effect. Their work provides a unique perspective to understanding cancer immunology and could be the basis for many novel treatment options.

“That’s what’s so great about Genentech,” Shannon says. “We’re always encouraged to dig really deep into understanding the biology so we can build the best possible therapies. It really helps put your work into context and gives you a greater sense of purpose.”



Shannon Turley is a Vice President and Senior Fellow in Immunology and OMNI Biomarker Discovery at Genentech. Learn more about her work here.