Sarah Crome, PhD

Dr. Crome joined BC Cancer in 2025 after serving as a Senior Scientist at the University Health Network and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, where she held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Tissue-Specific Immune Tolerance. There, Dr. Crome led single-cell profiling efforts defining tissue-resident immune programs in the human kidney, transplantation, and inflammatory disease, including the first comprehensive single-cell atlas of healthy human kidney. Most recently, her integrated discovery framework has enabled the development of regulatory ILC2-based cell therapy platforms for graft-versus-host disease and islet transplantation, and the expansion of immune-engineering strategies to direct innate lymphocyte function and trafficking in vivo.

During her PhD with Dr. Megan Levings at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Crome defined the transcriptional, epigenetic, and functional programs governing human Th17 cells. During her postdoctoral training with Dr. Pamela Ohashi at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, she discovered a previously unrecognized regulatory NK cell-like ILC population in human ovarian cancer. This work, published in Nature Medicine, demonstrated that tumour-associated NK cells can acquire a regulatory phenotype that directly suppresses T cell function and predicts adverse clinical outcomes.

Her scientific contributions have been recognized with multiple national and international awards, including the Rising Star Award from the International Union of Immunological Societies, the Next Generation of Scientists Award from the Cancer Research Society, and the New Investigator Award from the Canadian Society for Immunology.