Undergraduate Research Assistant - Zandstra Stem Cell Bioengineering Laboratory
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Researching protein interaction domains and designing genetic constructs to optimize a programmable, modular and tuneable chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) platform for an off-the-shelf CAR T-cell therapy generated from human PSCs. This split system was previously shown to increase the efficacy of CAR T-Cell therapy in PBMC-isolated T-cells by enabling the recognition of multiple tumor antigens, thus addressing the issue of antigen heterogeneity in tumors. Accompanying this advancement is the opportunity to program logic gates and on/off switches into CAR T-cell therapy using binding competition, thus introducing possible spatial and temporal control of the treatment. However, this system has only been optimized using 2D in-vitro assays that fail to recapitulate the 3D tumor microenvironment. I, in collaboration with a graduate student in my lab, aim to test the system in vascularized tumor spheroids on microfluidic chips to elucidate the system efficacy in solid tumors.