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The Brudno Lab Receives Grant to Study New Cancer Therapies

Materials scaffolds to transform cellular therapy: Dry alginate scaffolds (left) can be analyzed by microCT to understand their internal pore structure (purple). The pores interconnectivity is shown on the right with each pore represented as a sphere and its color represented by the color.
Yevgeny Brudno
Yevgeny Brudno, Assistant Professor, Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, UNC Chapel Hill, NC State University

The Brudno lab recently received an R37 grant from the National Cancer Institute. This 7-year, 2.8 million dollar grant will be used to design new materials and chemistry to manufacture CAR-T cellIs. 

“CAR-T cells are a revolutionizing cancer treatment”, said Yevgeny Brudno. “The therapy uses the immune cell from the patient and genetically educates the cells to target and kill cancer in the body.“

“However, CAR-T therapy costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and takes weeks and months to manufacture”, adds Brudno, “This collaborative grant will be used to develop materials that reduce manufacturing time to a single day and cost a fraction of the current price.”

Yevgeny Brudno is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering based at NC State University. He is also an associate faculty within the Department of Chemistry at NC State. The study was conducted in collaboration with Frances Ligler, Ross Lampe Distinguished Professor with the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State University.

 

Brudno Lab Scheme
Comparing strategies to make CAR-T cells. Conventional CAR-T cell therapy can take weeks and costs as much as $500,000 due to the complex, laborious manufacturing process. The Brudno lab is developing materials that shorten CAR-T cell generation to a single day, slashing the costs and labor involved and significantly reducing CAR-T cell differentiation and improving therapy.

This post was originally published in Department of Chemistry.