Corynn Kasap
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive cancer of blood-forming cells, and only about 30 percent of patients are alive five years after diagnosis. Treatments that redirect a patient's own immune cells against cancer have changed outcomes in several blood cancers, but they have been hard to apply to AML.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Microbiology & Immunology
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
acute myeloid leukemia
chimeric antigen receptor
T-cell engager
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2031
What they work on
- Use computational protein engineering to build a CAR-T cell based on the natural ligand of CD70, a protein found on AML cells but largely absent from normal tissue, and test whether it clears CD70-low leukemia blasts.
- Test whether the engineered natural-ligand CAR-T can eliminate leukemic stem cells, the rare cells believed to drive AML relapse, using mouse leukemia models rather than dish-based assays.
- Engineer an anti-CD70 T cell that secretes multiple T-cell-engager antibodies, proteins that bridge T cells to tumor cells, within the leukemic stem cell niche of the bone marrow.
- Characterize how the engineered T cells interact with leukemia cells using single-cell profiling and bioinformatic analysis in R, to learn which features predict clearance of residual disease.
More about the research
The reason is a shortage of targets that appear on leukemia cells and not on healthy tissue, so these therapies either harm normal cells or do too little at doses patients can tolerate.
Why it matters
AML affects roughly 20,000 Americans each year and kills most of them within five years. Engineered immune cell therapies have so far been limited in AML by toxicity and weak activity, because few targets distinguish leukemia from healthy tissue. Designing CD70-directed T cell therapies that also reach low-CD70 blasts and leukemic stem cells could offer patients treatments with a better chance of cure and fewer side effects, and the approach may extend to other cancers with mixed tumor cell populations.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xunlei Kang
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how DPP4, a cell-surface enzyme, controls the location, survival and self-renewal of human AML stem cells, using colony-forming assays and mice carrying human AML cells.
Wei Du
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Examine how TREM1, a stress-induced immune receptor, acts within leukemia-associated macrophages during leukemia development, using inducible macrophage-specific Trem1 knockout mice in Fanca-deficient and MLL-AF9 leukemia models.
Roderick O'Connor
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine the separate energy costs of T cell migration versus immune synapse formation and killing, using a specialized CAR T cell conditioning regimen and real-time eSIGHT RTCA cell analysis.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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