Charles Park started off following in his father’s footsteps, getting a bachelor’s and master’s in chemical engineering. But throughout his studies, he found himself drawn to another scientific discipline. “Even as I was doing chemical engineering, I was more interested in biology,” he said. So he switched, dipping a toe into tissue engineering.
It was around that time, he said, that his mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and he began trying to understand how clinicians use the immune system to diagnose and treat cancer. The more he learned, the more he became fascinated with it.
“Tissues work in harmony. What I realized is an immune system is like that. It’s not a physical entity, but they have immune cells that are communicating with one another, forming a robust system in the body,” said Park, who also goes by his Korean name Kyung Soo. “What I thought was maybe I could engineer the immune system as well, just like I was engineering tissues.”
Park’s work through his Ph.D. and now his postdoc in Samir Mitragotri’s Harvard lab has centered around that idea. For one project, Park is focusing on macrophages. These cells have the potential to fight cancer and stimulate other immune cells to kill tumors, but they’re often co-opted by tumors to instead help the tumor grow. In some of his work, Park showed that macrophages can be stimulated in the lab to take on a more anti-cancer form that will then help stimulate increased immune activity against tumors when infused back into mice.
An engineer at heart, Park’s next project will attach “cellular backpacks” to the macrophage to provide activation signals to keep the cell in an anti-cancer form even as it receives pro-tumor signals from malignant cells. As he approaches the end of his postdoc, he said he plans to make this kind of immune engineering a focus of the lab he hopes to start.
— Angus Chen
