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Dr. DeSelm is an Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at the Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. DeSelm’s research is focused broadly on the re-engineering of immune cells to fight cancer, using CAR cellular therapy. One major obstacle to applying this technique to all cancers is the difficulty in finding target molecules that are only expressed on the tumor cells, but not on critical normal tissues. Further, if not every tumor cell expresses the target molecule, the cancer will not be cured, as the negative cells that escape will eventually grow back.

One major focus of his lab is identifying novel ways that CAR cellular therapy can overcome the problem of antigen escape in order to fully eliminate disseminated, heterogeneous cancer cells. Additional problems exist in solid tumors, including poor penetration of the tumor by CAR-T cells, and inherent resistance of particular tumors to T cell killing. The mechanisms by which these occur, and methods to overcome them, are active areas of investigation within the laboratory.