Engineering the Body's Defenses
Lance Kam | Biomedical Engineering
This time of year, the immune system's ability to detect and counter infectious agents is among the body's most remarkable — and welcome — capabilities. Durable as this response may seem in the face of internal and external invasions, it is extremely intricate, and small disruptions can have large implications to the body's response.
However, the immune system sometimes needs help. Lance Kam, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, seeks to improve immune response by combining cellular and molecular biology with technology adapted from the microelectronics industry. These techniques may one day allow doctors to retrain a patient's immune system to combat cancer, treat autoimmune diseases, and prevent transplant rejection.
Their research has shown that T lymphocytes, key regulators of the body's ability to recognize previous threats and adapt to new ones, respond in specific ways to patterns of proteins and other bio-molecules they come in contact with. By recreating these patterns at a scale as fine as tens of nanometers, Kam's group, together with colleagues in an NIH-sponsored Nanomedicine Development Center, has been able to manipulate the activation of T lymphocytes to combat specific threats.
One of the threats of particular interest is cancer. A normally functioning immune system is able to weed out cancer cells that periodically arise in the body. Over time, people appear to lose that ability, making us more susceptible to cancerous mutations as we age. Identifying the patterns that produce cancer-fighting T lymphocytes would allow doctors to produce more of them and effectively retrain a patient's immune system to fight the disease naturally.
Kam, who received his PhD in biomedical engineering, did post-doctoral research in chemistry at Stanford prior to coming to Columbia Engineering.
