Unlocking the Potential of Genome Engineering in Cancer Treatment: A Conversation with Dr. Branden Moriarity

This month we sat down with Branden Moriarity, PhD, for a conversation on the transformative potential of genome engineering in curing cancer. Don’t miss Dr. Moriarity as our special guest at the upcoming Fireside Chat on December 11!

What is your educational background? What intrigued you about your field of specialty?

I did my undergraduate work at St. Olaf College majoring in biology and chemistry with a concentration in biomolecular sciences. Then I began my doctorate program at the University of Minnesota, studying molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and genetics, which I completed in 2012. After that, I began my postdoctoral fellowship, also at the U, which lasted until 2014. My specialization is in translational cell therapy.  This field intrigued me because I believe it will be the cure for many types of cancers and other diseases.

What is an engineered immune cell and how does it work as a treatment?

The immune system is your main defense against infectious diseases and cancer development. It is only when your immune cells fail to recognize and eradicate cancer that it becomes clinically detectable. Given this, immune cells are an obvious source of therapy for the treatment of cancer, but they need to be manipulated to enhance their ability to find and eradicate cancer. We achieve this manipulation through genome engineering. A genome is the complete set of DNA, or genetic material, in an organism. It contains all the information an organism needs to develop, function, and maintain itself throughout its life. So, genome engineering allows us to change the genetic code of cells, i.e. DNA, to present the immune cells with new functions to help them better identify and eradicate cancer.

What types of cancer(s) or other diseases have engineered immune cells shown results for?

The use of manipulated or genome engineered immune cells has cured numerous types of cancers, even highly advanced metastatic cancers—cancers that have spread throughout the body. However, the most success has been observed in 'liquid tumors', such as leukemia, using T cells that have been genome engineered to better detect cancer. Their success in solid tumor cancers to date has been somewhat underwhelming, but we are making good progress by deploying advanced genome engineering to overcome the challenges posed by solid tumor cancers. Additionally, engineered immune cells are also being leveraged to fight other diseases as well, such as autoimmune diseases and neurodegenerative diseases.

What is the advantage of using engineered immune cells over other types of treatment (when relevant for a patient)?

Since your immune cells have evolved to detect and eradicate cancer, they are an obvious therapeutic choice to develop into a cure for cancer. Moreover, they can be highly specific to only kill cancer cells and thus have much fewer side effects than current cancer therapies that use toxic chemotherapy and radiation.

How is your work at MCC advancing understanding of cancer and how we prevent/diagnose it?

Our work largely focuses on translating research into practical treatments, so we aren’t directly working on preventing or diagnosing cancer right now. However, our research does advance our understanding of how and why cancer resists therapy, which helps us design better genome-engineered immune cell therapies for the future.