Upon graduating, Shipp joined the faculty at Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. In 1996, Shipp was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.[2] She was eventually named chief of the Division of Hematologic Neoplasia at Dana-Farber. In this role, she found a molecular "signature" in a form of lymphoma that identified patients unlikely to respond well to standard chemotherapy, and who could benefit from treatment with certain experimental targeted drugs.[3] Following this, Shipp's research team found that serum galectin-1 levels were "significantly associated with tumor burden and additional adverse clinical characteristics in newly diagnosed Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) patients." As such, they developed antibodies that recognize the galectin-1 protein and were used in developing the sandwich ELISA assay.[4]
In 2014, as chief of the Division of Hematological Neoplasia at Dana-Farber and director of the Lymphoma Program at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, Shipp was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine.[5] Following her appointment, Shipp and her colleagues led a study on the successfulness of nivolumab, which prompted the Food and Drug Administration to designate it a "breakthrough therapy" for treating relapsed Hodgkin lymphoma.[6] By the start of 2017, nivolumab had been FDA-approved for use on individuals with Hodgkin lymphoma, melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, and squamous cell cancer of the head and neck.[7] Following this, she oversaw a study showing that Hodgkin lymphomas frequently avoid immune detection by eliminating their MHC class I proteins.[8]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shipp and her colleague Scott J. Rodig earned a Blood Cancer Discoveries Grant to map the immune microenvironment in classical Hodgkin lymphoma.[9]
