The José-Carreras Foundation for Leukemia granted me a research scholarship for the next 3 years to improve the treatment options for patients with Graft-versus-Host Disease (GvHD). I'm beyond grateful for the opportunity!

Thread on why it matters! 🧵1/9

Leukemia is a potentially deadly blood cancer. In different forms, it can affect anyone at any age. You can read about it for example here: https://www.cancer.gov/types/leukemia 2/9

Immuno-oncology, researcher and clinician.

What you won't read is how hard one is thrown down at diagnosis. You have cancer. Yet you are young, very well taken care of yourself and full in the middle of planning your life. It's not f* fair. The amount of information you must soak in at diagnosis is tremendous. The treatments will drag you through hell. If you manage to get through them, chances are, adverse effects will have left scars that will make you need to re-learn how to live. But you have a chance, in some cases this disease is curable - and that's why we solely focus and emphasize that now is not the time to let yourself down. It's time to fight, to have faith, to take a deep breath and to make this next moment count. This fighting spirit means everything, to us healthcare professionals, to the families and to you.

So, to the science part now. 3/9

Some cells are mutated into having unfair proliferative advantages. They will progressively expand and exhaust important resources and space from other healthy compartments. For instance in Acute Myeloid Leukemia we will try to push back with Chemo, but that is rarely the end of it. Antibodies might enable better pushback if you match an adequate risk profile and there is sadly still not an approved chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy for this particular leukemia. So later down the line, many patients will go into an Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation (Allo-SCT). 4/9

Allo-SCT: Eliminating the problem by its root. With a myeloablative chemotherapy, all circulating hematologic cells (healthy and leukemic) will in a matter of days perish, and so will the bone marrow, the place from where they stem. The cancer will be hopefully gone - but so will be healthy hematopoiesis. At this point you must receive a bone marrow transplant in order to survive, otherwise white, red blood cells and platelets won't come back on their own. 5/9

Once the transplant, also known as graft, reaches your bone marrow it should jump-start your hematopoiesis. In a perfect case scenario, this graft will also ensure a much needed Graft-versus-Leukemia effect that will keep that cancer at bay. In a realistic scenario, this graft will at unfortunate times and with varying degrees of intensity trigger an undesired GvHD - which can also, in its worse forms, be lethal. 6/9

GvHD, can afflict target organs like skin, gut, kidney, lung (and others). Immune cells from the transplant donor can react with the receiver's healthy tissue. This immune reaction is not yet fully understood. We know some of the cellular and molecular mediators, but we don't have a precise way of specifically shutting down GvHD in afflicted organs while sparing others. Probably the most effective medication for GvHD remains corticosteroids which increase the risk of (leukemia) relapse and come with tremendous side-effects of their own. 7/9

Our lab will be putting together well-known genetic engineering modules together to generate a cell therapy product that:
 1) can be universally transfused to any patient without rejection risks
 2) knows where to go inside the body
 3) can shut down known immune inflammation mechanisms of GvHD
 4) can be remotely defused if it stops working towards the desired effect 8/9