The Brudno Lab Receives Grant to Study New Cancer Therapies

June 27, 2021 Nada Taylor

Brudno Lab XRay — 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.

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 for manufacturing CAR-T cells.

“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.