UMass Amherst Highlights Ashish Kulkarni as October 2024 Spotlight Scholar
Ashish Kulkarni, associate professor of chemical engineering in the UMass Amherst College of Engineering, has been featured as a Spotlight Scholar for October 2024.
In his Immunoengineering Research Laboratory, Kulkarni leads a team of researchers working at the intersection of bioengineering, immunology and cancer studies, targeting aggressive forms of cancer that are often resistant to traditional treatments. Kulkarni’s lab conducts research aimed at making immunotherapy effective for as many cancer patients as possible.
The lab seeks to advance a fundamental understanding of how cancer cells interact with the immune system, including why certain types of cancer don’t respond to current forms of immunotherapy. With this knowledge, they aim to develop novel nanotechnology-based delivery platforms to activate immune cells to target cancer. Finally, they are working to identify biomarkers (molecules on the surface of cancer or immune cells, or molecules released by these cells) to predict how individual patients will respond to specific treatments.
“We know cancer is complex. Individuals’ immune systems also work differently, with some being stronger than others, so personalization is key,” Kulkarni says. “With the therapies we’re developing, we want to boost the immune system to be stronger and remove the ‘cloak’ that cancer cells use to avoid detection. We are also thinking about combination therapies, with multiple drugs that can activate different arms of the immune system to most effectively target the cancer and create long-lasting immune responses.”
Kulkarni has received many prestigious awards in recognition of his lab’s impactful research, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an American Cancer Society (ACS) Research Scholar Award and ACS Chemical & Engineering News’s Talented 12, among others. His research has been published in high-impact journals such as Nature Biomedical Engineering, Science Advances, Advanced Materials and Biomaterials. Kulkarni has also co-founded two start-up companies built on his research.