Kelsey Kubelick joins LSI as a new post-doc. Kelsey is originally from Pittsburgh, PA. She completed her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech in 2020 with Dr. Stanislav Emelianov in the Ultrasound Imaging and Therapeutics Research Lab. Her dissertation research focused on developing photoacoustic imaging methods to track cells and particles. Read more about Kelsey here.
Congratulations to Shreyas Dahotre for becoming the second LSI Ph.D. graduate! Shreyas successfully defended his thesis, titled “Programmable Immune Cytometry and Diagnostics,” in front of a virtual crowd on July 14, 2020. We look forward to your future success!
Congratulations to Ian Miller for being the first Ph.D. graduate from LSI! Ian successfully defended his thesis, titled “Remote control of CAR T cell therapies by thermal targeting,” in front of a virtual crowd on June 23, 2020. We look forward to your future success!
Congratulations to McKenzie, Melanie, Haley, and the rest of their team for their winning app at EGHI/GT HACK COVID-19! The team developed CAPACIT, an app that communicates current population density at businesses to potential shoppers. Users can plan their day from live updates on current capacity of public spaces through the app.
Watch their pitch video below and follow the progress of the team here.
Thanks to Biolocity for funding our work on COVID-19 diagnostics! Biolocity is a philanthropic, multi-institutional network supporting university medical technology commercialization in the southeast. Through a combination of investment, project management, consulting, and educational programming, Biolocity provides early-stage, patient impacting technologies with the resources needed to reach critical commercialization milestones.
By Georgia Parmelee
Gabe Kwong’s research focuses on engineering immunity to transform human health
For patients undergoing transplant surgeries, there is always the immediate concern of the body rejecting the new organ – be it a lung, kidney or heart. There are a few different ways the body can reject an organ, one type being T cell mediated rejection. T cells are immune cells that recognize diseases, or in this case foreign organs, and attack because they sense a danger to the body. In the worst case scenario, the newly transplanted organ is rejected, leaving the patient back at square one.
Traditionally, to track and manage T cell response to organ transplants, also known as grafts, a biopsy is done to look at the tissue to monitor the health of the graft. These biopsies are highly invasive, using large needles that can lead to pain and excessive bleeding. They are also just a moment-in-time static snapshot of the health of the graft. That’s where Gabe Kwong’s research comes in with his Laboratory for Synthetic Immunity.
“What you really want to know is patient trajectory,” said Kwong, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. “With traditional biopsies, you don’t know if the transplant organ is getting better or if it’s going to get worse. The non-invasive platform that we are developing measures T cell activity. If T cells are being overactive, you can track that with our miniaturized biological sensors that probe the graft for early signs of transplant rejection. Our approach is a noninvasive solution to the biopsy.”
One part of Kwong’s lab is focused on immune sensing, like the T cell sensor for organ transplants, but his work goes further, including engineered T cell therapies for cancer.
“An exciting area of my lab is designing next-generation T cell therapies,” said Kwong. “We treat them like a living drug, a smart drug, because those T cells know where to go, can recognize tumor cells, and kill them.”
Although T cell therapies have the potential to cure patients of disease, a major challenge is that tumors have the uncanny ability to evade immune recognition and even set up a suppressive environment that turn-off T cells once they arrive in the tumor.
When a T cell moves into a tumor to try to suppress it, the tumor will switch off the T cells’ cancer-killing abilities. To address this, Kwong is developing remote-controlled T Cells that leverage a light beam to control the T cells and turn them back on. The first-generation platform involves making the T cells sensitive to local increases in heat.
“You can use the laser light to heat a tumor and then communicate with the T cells and see if you can make them kill tumor cells better,” explained Kwong. “In preclinical models, we are able to induce durable and curative responses.”
Students in Kwong’s Laboratory for Synthetic Immunity
Kwong’s work isn’t happening in a vacuum. In 2015, he co-founded a company called Glympse Bio with the goal of transforming disease monitoring and treatment response. Glympse creates sensors designed to replace the biopsy, with the first focus being on liver biopsy. Recently, the company had its first human trials on healthy volunteers.
According to Kwong, with liver fibrosis or fatty liver disease, drug responses aren’t instantaneous. With oral drug therapies, it can take months to see any sort of potential change in the progression of the disease. For pharmaceutical companies, they still rely on a liver biopsy and sometimes don’t know for months or even up to two years if the drug works and is ready for mass consumption. This is one of the reasons the drug approval process takes so long. But Glympse is trying to change that.
“The long-term goal of the company is to create products that are non-invasive, replacing the biopsy,” said Kwong. “That should help pharma accelerate drug trials. The sensors we are creating have the potential to be predictive so you can get a read out within two weeks of the state of the patient versus waiting twelve months for a biopsy read to determine patient response to drugs.”
Kwong is dedicated to his research, with a passion that started as early as his undergraduate education at UC Berkeley. And it makes him an uncommon engineer as well, given his dedication to the long-term, tireless work that immunoengineering requires.
“You have to be at the top of your game the whole time, and be exceedingly patient,” said Kwong. “The timeline for translational research in the life sciences is long, and you aren’t going to get instantaneous results. But in 10 years of working with this technology, I haven’t lost my drive or passion, and it hasn’t gotten less interesting.”
Congratulations to Anna for winning a fellowship from the NSF GRFP! The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. Read more here.
Congratulations to Kevin Tao for receiving a 2020 Barry Goldwater Scholarship! The Goldwater Scholarship is the preeminent undergraduate award for outstanding students pursuing careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. Goldwater Scholars have been awarded 92 Rhodes Scholarships, 137 Marshall Awards, 159 Churchill Scholarships, 104 Hertz Fellowships, and numerous other distinguished awards like the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships.
Gabe Kwong Promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure
Kwong’s lab pioneers powerful new technologies to address frontier clinical challenges – including ultrasensitive diagnostics for early detection of disease, engineered T cells as curative therapies, and high-throughput tools to study rare immune cells. His research directly impacts a broad range of complex human diseases including cancer, organ transplant rejection, and infectious diseases. Kwong’s innovative research has been recognized by the NIH New Innovator Award, Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, and the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation Award.
Congratulations to Dr. Kwong and the rest of the LSI team for Gabe’s promotion!
Our paper on developing synthetic biomarkers for non-invasive early detection of organ transplant rejection won the 2020 Sigma Xi Best Faculty Paper Award at Georgia Tech. Congrats to Gabe and to Quoc for spearheading the research!
Read the announcement from the BME Department here.
