John Paul Murad, PhD

University of Southern California – Keck School of Medicine
$100,000 Tower Career Development Grant

Research Title:
Genetically-defined Ovarian Cancer Models for the Development of Next-Generation CAR T Cells

Ovarian cancer (OC) is one of the main causes of cancer deaths in women. Even after strong treatments, the cancer often comes back, so we need better treatments. In our lab we made a special therapy called CAR T cell therapy, that attacks a marker called TAG72 found on OC cells. Early tests show that our therapy is safe, and has some activity, but can still be better. One way to help our treatment is to make sure many important common errors found in the DNA of OC cells are included when testing our treatment. So our plan is to create very specific OC cells that use special combinations of these common DNA errors. Having this will help show us how to improve our CAR T cells to fight the cancer, and make the treatment stronger and safer for more ovarian cancer patients.