LSI participates at 10th annual Atlanta Science Festival
LSI returned to the Atlanta Science Festival with our booth titled, “How can tiny molecules catch big diseases?” K-12 students learned about hydrogels by making alginate spheres!
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FUS Foundation sponsors LSI and Arvanitis Lab to fight brain tumors
The Focused Ultrasound Foundation awarded a 1.5-year grant to remotely control thermal sensitive CAR T cells in the brain by MR-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS). This collaborative project between LSI and Dr. Costas Arvanitis’s Ultrasound Biophysics and Bioengineering Laboratory is focused on spatially controlling CAR T cells under MRgFUS to mitigate antigen escape and potentiate anti-tumor responses in difficult-to-treat breast cancer brain metastases.
Compressed sensing with promiscuous substrates published in Cell Reports Methods
Our work in collaboration with Dr. Peng Qiu’s group on a computational method to select libraries of promiscuous substrates that can classify mixtures of proteases was published in Cell Reports Methods! Congratulations to Brandon and the team! Read the full manuscript here.
Sofia Vainikos and Elif Kulaksizoglu win PURA Salary Awards
Congratulations to Sofia and Elif for winning President’s Undergraduate Research Salary Awards (PURA) for Spring 2023! PURA funds student salaries to conduct undergraduate research with Georgia Tech faculty and offsets travel expenses for undergraduates to present their research at professional conferences. Read more about PURA here.
Lenny Rogers joins LSI as a post-doctoral fellow
Leonard “Lenny” Rogers joins LSI as a new post-doc. Lenny is from Kansas City, Missouri, and completed his Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis, where he developed an intracellular arginine sensor to track resistance to arginine deprivation therapy and discovered an important new mechanism of resistance to this therapy working with Prof. Brian Van Tine. Read more about Lenny here.
Dr. Kwong wins NIH Director’s Pioneer Award
Dr. Gabe Kwong is the first faculty member at Georgia Tech to be awarded the prestigious NIH Director’s Pioneer Award! This award is the NIH’s largest grant in the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program and will provide LSI $5.5 million over the next five years to, in the words of Dr. Kwong, “develop a living sensor – immune cells that can traffic through the body and act as a long-lived pool of sentinels.” Read more below about LSI’s exciting new project, titled “Finding Sleeping Beauty: T Cell Biosensors for Dormant Cancer Detection”:
Summary | Some types of cancers, such as estrogen receptor positive breast cancer, can recur as metastatic disease many years or even decades following a dormancy period where the patient displays no clinical symptoms. Currently, there is no widely used method to monitor the dormant state nor its reawakening. The arrival of cancer immunotherapy has revealed exciting possibilities using engineered T cells as living medicines to achieve striking responses in patients with cancers that were previously untreatable. This moment is an opportunity to not only build a future where T cells are engineered as therapies, but also as living sensors that can detect cancer with sensitivities and specificities beyond what is currently possible. This project seeks to engineer T cells as ultrasensitive biosensors to detect dormant cancer and when they reawaken by amplifying the release of synthetic biomarkers (blood, urine and imaging) for detection. These technological breakthroughs will have huge implications in understanding how and when dormant cells reawaken and guide therapeutic interventions at the earliest stages of reactivation.
Press Coverage | Georgia Tech College of Engineering “A Record Four Researchers Win NIH Director’s Awards” | Georgia Tech Biomedical Engineering “Kwong using NIH Director’s Pioneer Award to Develop Living Biosensors”
Four new PhD students join LSI
LSI is excited to welcome new graduate students Chloé Thiveaud, Eric Lee, Jamey Siebart, and Sean Chan! Chloé completed her bachelors at Georgia Tech while working as an undergraduate researcher in LSI. Eric graduated from UC Berkeley and worked on CAR T cell therapy at City of Hope before joining LSI. Jamey received a B.S. in Bioengineering at the University of Washington while researching optogenetic biosensors. Sean worked on non-viral transfection at Rubius Therapeutics after completing B.S. and M.S. degrees at UMichigan and Johns Hopkins, respectively. Read more about our new lab members here.
NIBIB awards R01 grant to engineer photothermally activated CAR T cells
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institute of Health is funding a collaborative project led by LSI and Dr. Stanislav Emelianov’s Ultrasound Imaging and Therapeutics Research Laboratory. In this project, we will engineer gold nanorod labeled CAR T cells to track delivery of CAR T cells to tumors, remotely activate CAR T cells to enhance their local potency, and monitor key CAR T cell functions within the tumor microenvironment.
Summary | The limited ability to control adoptively transferred CAR T cells at sites of disease contributes to poor anti-tumor responses against solid malignancies. This proposal seeks to develop an image-guided therapy based on photothermal activation of CAR T cells to increase treatment precision and improve patient responses.
LSI welcomes new technician Aparna Subramaniam
Aparna was born in Chennai, India, and grew up in Atlanta, GA. She graduated with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Tech and is currently enrolled in the Masters of Biomedical Innovation and Development program at Georgia Tech. As an undergrad, Aparna was involved with several Global Health projects, where she designed solutions for fetal heart rate monitoring, detecting early onset of preeclampsia and preventing neonatal hypothermia. In her free time, Aparna loves to cook, travel, read, and spend time with her friends and family.
Ali Zamat wins F31 fellowship
Ali was awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award – i.e., the F31 fellowship – by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health to sponsor his project entitled “Focused ultrasound control of intratumoral NKG2DL BTE production by CAR T cells to potentiate epitope spread.” Congrats to Ali!
Summary | To enhance CAR T cells for solid tumors, potent immunomodulators such as cytokines or bispecific T cell engagers (BTEs) can be co-infused. However, systemic delivery of these agents breaches self-tolerance resulting in numerous immune related adverse effects. This proposal seeks to use focused ultrasound to non- invasively control the intratumoral production of BTEs by thermal sensitive CAR T cells to enhance anti-tumor activity and elucidate mechanisms of epitope spread by investigating DC priming of endogenous T cells.