BME Speaker Series: Dr. Keyue Shen, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Shen will present "Engineering Cell Microenvironments for Cancer Therapeutics"

Title: Engineering Cell Microenvironments for Cancer Therapeutics

Abstract: Host stromal cells have been increasingly recognized as key regulators in cancer microenvironment. As cancer progresses, normal suppressive stroma is replaced by an activated, cancer-promoting one. This is accompanied by suppression of tumor-inhibiting infiltrating lymphocytes, and an increasingly disorganized tumor-stroma interface. In this talk, I will present subcellular microengineering approaches to control T cell activation through spatial and mechanical cues for cancer immunotherapy. I will also demonstrate an interfacial interaction model for understanding spatially resolved tumor-stromal signaling and discovering cancer chemotherapeutics that target the tumor-stroma interface.

Biography: Keyue Shen is a Research Fellow at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where he has won an MGH Fund for Medical Discovery Award. He received his Ph.D with Distinction in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, and obtained M.S. in Biophysics and B.Eng. (summa cum laude) in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University of China. His research interests are in developing in vitro microengineered models of cell microenvironments in immune system, cancer, and stem cell niches, for applications in immune and cancer therapeutics, as well as regenerative medicine.