Special Bioengineering Seminar - Peter Zandstra -Monday, March 6, 2023 - 4 pm

Speaker:

Peter Zandstra CM, PhD, FRSC, FCAHS, PEng

Canada Research Chair in Stem Cell Engineering

The University of British Columbia

School of Biomedical Engineering

Michael Smith Laboratories

Date and Location:

Monday, March 6, 2023, 4pm
Location: Chen 100

Title: "Engineering t-cell development"

ABSTRACT:

Engineered T-cell therapies are at the leading edge of clinical cell and gene therapies. Responses to some liquid tumors have had a remarkable impact on patient care. This foundation motivates development of off-the-shelf engineered cell therapies for a broad range of devastating indications. Achieving this will require the cost effective manufacturing of precision therapeutics capable of addressing multiple process- and clinical-design challenges. Pluripotent stem cells derived engineered T-cells are emerging as a solution of choice. However, to enable this vision technologies capable of robustly orchestrating the complex series of time- and dose- dependent signals regained for functional T-cell development are needed. These need to be flexible enough to be able to adapt, in a modular manner, to new therapeutic needs and cell designs. In this seminar I will present our labs recent efforts to integrate cell and niche engineering to guide lymphoid cell development from human pluripotent stem cells.