Behind cardiovascular disease, cancer is the second major cause of death in the United States and will likely cause approximately 600,000 deaths in 2023 alone.1 While chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation therapy are traditional cancer treatments that can be applied individually or in combination, a patient’s response to these approaches depends on cancer type, location, heterogeneity, and drug resistance.2 Consequently, researchers need to develop novel therapies and delivery methods.
Khalid Shah, the director of the Center for Stem Cell and Translational Immunotherapy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, develops cancer therapeutics that use stem cells as delivery vectors to treat primary and metastatic brain and lung cancers. In a recently published Science Translational Medicine paper, Shah’s laboratory developed an allogeneic twin stem cell system carrying oncolytic viral particles and immunomodulators to treat brain metastases.3 A few weeks later, his lab also published a Stem Cells ...
