When people get cancer, they undergo a first-line treatment. If that fails, they try a second-line treatment, then a third, then a fourth, and so on.
One of the reasons these interventions can fail is because tumor cells aren’t all the same. They often vary from cell to cell, and can change and adapt over time. The only way to overcome such an adversary, Yapeng Su believes, is to counter them with something as cunning as the cancer itself: the human immune system.
“You are chasing a moving target, and using a single molecule will not work for a long time. That’s how I got pulled into using the immune system to treat cancer,” said Su, a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Specifically, the goal is “to engineer live immune T cells as a living drug to treat cancer, in particular solid tumors.”
Adoptive cell therapies like CAR-T therapy have been extremely successful in treating many blood cancers, but getting them to work in solid tumors is a challenge. Su is taking a modern and somewhat unconventional approach that blends data science, engineering, and traditional biology. Using what he calls an “overwhelming ocean of information,” his aim is to reveal which key molecules and genes might help unlock cell therapy’s potential to treat solid tumors.
Su’s interest in science started at a young age, thanks to a chemist mother who encouraged him in STEM. When he chose his major for undergrad, he was originally thinking of chemistry. But then, Su settled on chemical engineering: “I always said engineering is more useful, more connected to society.”
For graduate school, Su entered the chemical engineering department at the California Institute of Technology but quickly became captivated by biology — in particular, the biology of cell therapy and immunology. During his postdoc at Fred Hutch, Su also worked on a Covid-19 project, using a big data approach to understand why people respond differently to the disease. Altogether, Su said, these different disciplines helped him carve out his own way of investigating cell therapies for cancer.
Now, he said, his goal is not only to find ways to engineer these living drugs to defeat cancer, but also find a way to improve their manufacturing to make them cheaper and more accessible.
—Angus Chen
