Mohamad Hamieh
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
CAR T-cell therapy turns a patient's own immune cells into cancer killers. T cells are engineered to carry a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), a synthetic receptor that recognizes tumor cells.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
CAR T-cell therapy
chimeric antigen receptor
adoptive cell therapy
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Test strategies to reduce ICANS, the neurotoxicity of CAR T-cell therapy, by targeting extracellular vesicles released by activated CAR T cells, using animal models that track blood-brain barrier integrity and antitumor activity.
- Characterize vesicles in blood serum from CAR T-cell-treated patients with and without ICANS to identify biomarkers for early risk assessment and treatment.
- Define how immune regulatory ligands that CAR T cells make themselves affect their function under different levels of antigen stimulation.
- Determine how immune regulatory ligands that CAR T cells pick up from tumors affect T-cell function, using complementary in vitro and in vivo models.
- Determine how a synthetic costimulatory receptor platform, which turns inhibitory ligand contacts into activating signals, works and whether it improves CAR T-cell persistence in blood cancer and solid tumor models.
More about the research
These therapies have transformed treatment of hard-to-treat B-cell blood cancers, but they face two major problems. Some patients develop serious brain side effects. In many others, tumors resist treatment or come back. The two projects here address both problems: what causes the neurotoxicity and how to prevent it, and how to make engineered T cells persist and work better against tumors.
Why it matters
CAR T-cell therapy can cause dangerous brain toxicity, and many cancers resist or relapse after it. Blood-based vesicle markers could help doctors predict which patients will develop neurotoxicity, and blocking these vesicles may make treatment safer without losing its anticancer effect. Engineered receptors that turn inhibitory signals into activating ones could improve CAR T cells against blood cancers and solid tumors.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Akhavan
University of Kansas, KS·Biomedical Engineering
Develop nanocarriers, tiny drug-carrying particles, that can be loaded into CAR T cells, which are engineered tumor-targeting immune cells, to create a platform for delivering drugs into glioblastoma.
Glenna Foight
Baylor College of Medicine, TX·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how complexes of bZIP-family transcription factors, proteins that switch genes on or off, regulate T-cell exhaustion, using engineered protein inhibitors that block specific factors.
James LaBelle
University of Chicago, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether venetoclax and other BH3 mimetics, drugs that block anti-death BCL-2 proteins, alter the function of CAR T cells made from healthy donors and heavily pretreated patients.
The school
Weill Medical College of Cornell University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 59 research doctorates a year.
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