Inventor Profiles

Research area Dey’s translational research laboratory studies the immune response to malignant brain cancers (both primary and metastatic). The lab’s mission is to develop successful immunotherapies for these devastating illnesses, while training the next generations of neurosurgeons, scientists and medical students.

• Lab website
• Patents, publications and more
• WARF Innovation Award Nomination

What excites you about your work? 

“My lab is primarily focused on developing new immunotherapies for brain cancer, where we leverage a patient’s own immune system and use our genomic understanding of a specific patient’s cancer to develop a personalized therapeutic cancer vaccine. What’s currently most exciting is a personalized, gene-modified tumor vaccine we developed from patient tumor cells that can super charge an aging immune system to better attack cancer cells. It has shown great efficacy in multiple types of mouse brain tumor models, and we’re really excited about moving it into the clinical realm in an early phase clinical trial to offer hope to brain cancer patients.”

What do you hope to achieve? 

“If I look at the really big picture, I will consider our mission successful if we can find an effective treatment for malignant brain cancer. That’s our overall goal. To get there, I think the smaller goals are to, on the one hand, develop these personalized vaccines as therapeutic modalities, and in parallel, to develop biomarkers and ways to track brain cancer that will tell us if our vaccines are working or not, in real time. It’s kind of a triple-pronged approach of attacking this disease by developing: effective therapeutics, better multi-modal monitoring and a biomarker-driven treatment strategy.”

We are excited about the work Mahua’s lab is performing. I think everybody understands the importance to treat, and hopefully cure, cancer, particularly debilitating diseases such as malignant brain tumors.

– Rafael Diaz, WARF, Licensing Manager