Abraham Lee
University of California-Irvine, CA·Biomedical Engineering
A cell's shape, and the shape of the compartments inside it, can reveal whether the cell is healthy, aging, or likely to spread cancer. Meanwhile, cell-based cancer treatments are powerful but slow and costly to make.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
Engineering
- Topics
microfluidics
single-cell analysis
3D cell morphology
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2031
What they work on
- Test whether the ADOPT droplet tomography platform can rapidly capture 3D shapes of single blood cells' membranes and organelles from a drop of blood, and compare these shapes with single-cell RNA data from Drop-seq.
- Determine how 3D cell and organelle shape relates to cell function and state, and how shear force reshapes cells and their force-sensing pathways.
- Assess whether 3D profiles of size and shape for immune and tumor cells reveal immune and metabolic health status.
- Optimize microfluidic production of artificial antigen-presenting cells by inserting antigen-presenting ligands into vesicle membranes and adding hydrogel cytoskeletons to tune stiffness for maximum T cell expansion.
- Measure how well aAPCs expand tumor-specific cytotoxic CD8 T cells from healthy-donor and breast cancer patient PBMCs, then scale up production and test tumor killing in a mouse melanoma model.
More about the research
This lab builds microfluidic devices, tiny channels that handle fluids and cells on a chip, to address both problems. One project captures the 3D shapes of thousands of single cells quickly. The other makes artificial cells that train the immune system's T cells to attack tumors.
Why it matters
3D cell shape could become an early warning sign for diseases such as metastatic cancer or cellular aging, read from a small blood sample. It could also help companies optimize engineered cells that produce antibodies or serve as cell therapies. Inexpensive, mass-produced artificial antigen-presenting cells could make T-cell cancer immunotherapy cheaper and simpler, because they remove the need to prepare these cells from each patient's own blood.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mostafa Yazdi
Missouri University of Science and Technology, MO·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Evaluate the anti-tumor activity of the Tumor-derived Cell-membrane Coated NanoVaccine (TCC-NV), adjuvant-loaded particles wrapped in tumor cell membranes, in immune-competent mouse models of triple-negative breast cancer.
Ashish Ranjan
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Determine how well histotripsy plus anti-CD40 antibody microparticles works in mouse melanoma models that differ in immune visibility and tumor burden.
Gabor J Tigyi
University of Tennessee Health Science Center, TN·Pharmacology
Optimize small-molecule antagonists of the LPAR5 receptor from existing screening hits, using computational scaffold hopping and a pharmacophore model that maps the chemical features needed for potent, selective binding.
The school
University of California-Irvine: 46 labs on PI Pages, $645M a year on research, 524 research doctorates a year.
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