Sidi Chen
Yale University, CT·Biomedical Engineering
Immune cells can be re-engineered to hunt tumors. In chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, a patient's T cells are given a synthetic receptor that recognizes a marker on cancer cells, then infused back.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
- Topics
CAR-T cells
chimeric antigen receptor
cellular immunotherapy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Advance and validate MAJESTIC, a gene delivery system combining mRNA, AAV vectors and the Sleeping Beauty transposon, testing efficient and stable cargo delivery with minimal toxicity across diverse immune cell types.
- Benchmark MAJESTIC against existing approaches such as lentiviral vectors, AAV, mRNA and CRISPR/Cas editing using quantitative performance measures, and extend it to new capabilities and cell types.
- Optimize TAILFUSE, a CAR engineering strategy that fuses cytoplasmic signaling tails onto chimeric antigen receptors, and test whether these fusions enhance in vivo anti-tumor efficacy of CAR-T cells.
- Validate broader applications of both toolkits in cancer-related cell types, establishing reproducible protocols for use in laboratory research and therapeutic development.
More about the research
This has worked clinically, but making such cells is difficult: the therapy needs cells that are potent, specific and safe, and current methods for getting new genes into immune cells each have drawbacks. This project builds and rigorously tests two engineering toolkits meant to make therapeutic immune cells easier to produce and better at killing tumors.
Why it matters
CAR-T therapy is limited by tumor antigen loss, T cell exhaustion and dysfunction, and poor persistence in the body, and by the difficulty of manufacturing potent cells. Validated gene delivery and receptor engineering toolkits could give researchers and therapeutic developers simpler ways to build more effective engineered immune cells against cancer, and would be usable across many cancer and immune cell types in laboratory research.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tim Luetkens
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Microbiology & Immunology
Quantify the kinetics and molecular drivers of CAR-mediated trogocytosis, the stripping of target proteins from tumor cells onto CAR T cells, using high-resolution live-cell imaging and combinatorial T cell engineering.
Theodore Nowicki
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Compare TNF-alpha-armed and conventional TCR and CAR T cells in humanized mouse xenografts, testing tumor killing, toxicity and T-cell entry into tumors across several TCRs, CARs and tumor types.
Dan Kaufman
University of California-San Diego, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether virus-like particles carrying DARPin or scFv targeting proteins deliver mRNA selectively to T cells, NK cells or macrophages, first in cell lines and then in primary human immune cells.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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