Research to advance personalized cancer treatment

In 2024, over two million new cases of cancer are expected to be diagnosed and more than 600,000 people are projected to die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society. While advances are being made in preventing and treating cancer, this complex disease continues to elude effective treatment in many cases.

“Cancer is very diverse. There’s no one-size-fits-all therapy to treat it. We must design more personalized approaches to treatment based on the type of cancer a patient has and what they’ll respond best to,” explains Ashish Kulkarni, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UMass Amherst.

In his Immunoengineering Research Laboratory, Kulkarni leads a team of researchers working at the intersection of bioengineering, immunology, and cancer studies, targeting aggressive forms of cancer that are often resistant to traditional treatments. This includes many different types of solid tumors—which are typically the most difficult to target with immunotherapy—including melanoma, bladder cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and neuroblastoma, among others.

Kulkarni’s study of cancer was partly inspired by witnessing his own family members battle the disease. “I saw how much suffering there was and the amount of work to be done,” he says.

Raised in a rural village in western India, Kulkarni grew up with limited access to resources and local opportunities for higher education. However, with unwavering determination and the support of his family, he became the first in his family to attend college, earning a degree in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai. He then worked for three years before moving to the United States to pursue his PhD in chemistry at the University of Cincinnati. After completing postdoctoral fellowships at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, focused on researching cancer therapies, he joined the UMass faculty in 2017.

At UMass, Kulkarni’s lab conducts research aimed at making immunotherapy effective for as many cancer patients as possible. As he explains it, immunotherapy is a unique cancer treatment that harnesses the body’s own immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells. One advantage of this approach is the immune system’s ability to work systemically, targeting cancers that have metastasized. However, he says, cancer cells are smart and have ways of evading the immune system.

The lab seeks to advance a fundamental understanding of how cancer cells interact with the immune system, including why certain types of cancer don’t respond to current forms of immunotherapy. With this knowledge, they aim to develop novel nanotechnology-based delivery platforms to activate immune cells to target cancer. Finally, they are working to identify biomarkers (molecules on the surface of cancer or immune cells, or molecules released by these cells) to predict how individual patients will respond to specific treatments.

“We know cancer is complex. Individuals’ immune systems also work differently, with some being stronger than others, so personalization is key,” Kulkarni says. “With the therapies we’re developing, we want to boost the immune system to be stronger and remove the ‘cloak’ that cancer cells use to avoid detection. We are also thinking about combination therapies, with multiple drugs that can activate different arms of the immune system to most effectively target the cancer and create long-lasting immune responses.”

Kulkarni has received many prestigious awards in recognition of his lab’s impactful research, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an American Cancer Society (ACS) Research Scholar Award, and ACS Chemical & Engineering News's Talented 12, among others. His research has been published in high-impact journals such as Nature Biomedical Engineering, Science Advances, Advanced Materials, and Biomaterials.  

Kulkarni has also co-founded two start-up companies built on his research. “One of the driving forces behind our research is how to effectively translate it to help patients,” he says.

The first start-up, Volvox Sciences, focuses on designing nanoparticles to target macrophage immune cells, which can be educated to “eat up” cancer cells. “They become ‘super eaters’ of cancer cells, like Pac-Man,” he explains, noting that the team has submitted a patent on this work and has promising data showing its effectiveness against different types of solid tumors. This project won a competitive Manning/IALS Innovation Award in 2021.

Kulkarni’s other start-up, Quaesar Biosciences, works on diagnostics, using biomarkers to show which cancer patients are most likely to respond to certain therapies. The team has seen promising results using samples from patients with ovarian cancer at area hospitals, though Kulkarni notes that this work is still in the early stages and more must be done to validate this biomarker.  

For Kulkarni, the meaning he finds in conducting research with the potential to help people is matched only by his satisfaction in mentoring young researchers. To date, he has mentored 80 undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting research fellows from India. He strives to maintain a diverse lab group and values the unique perspective each member brings.

“I try to create an environment that fosters creativity and critical thinking, where everyone can flourish. I take pride in my students being extremely collaborative and working well together and with students and faculty across and beyond UMass,” he says.

Kulkarni encourages his students to find their passion and stay curious and open-minded.  

“I know there’s a lot happening in the world and sometimes it’s disheartening. But don’t lose hope. Stay focused on your long-term goal and how you want to help society,” he says.

Despite the ups and downs he has weathered in his own academic career, Kulkarni is optimistic about the future of cancer treatment. AI and other technologies are accelerating the rate of discovery exponentially, he says.  

“We’re aiming to develop therapies that are very, very effective while being widely accessible to patients globally, regardless of their socioeconomic status,” he says, likening this endeavor to the recent effort to develop and deploy COVID-19 vaccines around the world.

And looking into the future, Kulkarni says, “Our ambitious goal is to stop working on cancer because we have cured cancer.”