Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy is a type of immunotherapy that reprograms a patient’s own immune cells to find and eliminate cancer. While it has transformed the outlook for some blood cancers, many patients eventually relapse, and the therapy has struggled to work effectively for solid tumors. A major hurdle is that these engineered cells often lose their effectiveness or die off before a cancer is fully eliminated. Signaling molecules called cytokines can boost CAR-T activity and maintain their function for longer stretches, but current methods of providing this boost have been limited by high toxicity and low precision.
Dr. Aalipour proposes a previously unexplored strategy to further engineer CAR-T cells with cytokine boosting proteins that are both more powerful and precise. Dr. Aalipour will test several dozen designs to identify the most promising candidates that can then be tested in clinical trials. His initial efforts will be in lymphoma and ovarian cancer, and his goal is to fully realize the curative potential of CAR-T therapies for patients with hard-to-treat cancers.
Dr. Aalipour is an oncologist who specializes in treating lymphoma patients. It is through his firsthand experience administering CAR-T therapies that has motivated him to improve this therapeutic strategy for his patients. Dr. Aalipour earned his Bachelors, Masters, PhD and MD degrees from Stanford University. In 2022, he was named to the Forbes Science 30 Under 30 list. He is currently an Oncology Clinical Fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, pursuing his postdoctoral work at MIT.
Mentor
Michael Birnbaum, PhD
Projects and Grants
A modular platform for reprogramming cytokine signaling in cellular immunotherapies
