There’s detective work going on inside of one of UNLV’s science labs: Medicinal chemist Chandra Bhattacharya is busy cracking the code for cancer therapy. 

The answer, she believes, lies in messenger RNA (mRNA). 

The science term likely sounds familiar for most, remembering back to the COVID pandemic and the race to develop the first mRNA vaccine to combat COVID. Using mRNA in this way wasn’t new, but the COVID pandemic helped to make it more mainstream which has allowed for a heightened research focus on how this technology can be used to treat other diseases.

For Bhattacharya, it helped to spark a years-long pursuit – first at MIT and now at UNLV – researching new immunotherapy delivery systems to battle cancer and other diseases like diabetes.

“The treatment methods currently available on the market for these devastating diseases are expensive and not accessible to the average person,” says the biochemist, who joined UNLV in early 2023. “My lab wants to take a new approach that improves lives by using personalized medicine to simplify the process of administering treatments, make them more effective, and reduce medical costs.”

After finishing a postdoc fellowship at MIT in the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world, she joined  UNLV’s College of Sciences as an assistant professor. She will continue her research here at UNLV looking at new methods for insulin delivery, as well as at therapeutic vaccines that are tailored to an individuals’ genetic makeup and use mRNA to both protect against and fight existing cancer cells.

Let’s take a peek inside the Bhattacharya Lab.

Tell us about your research and what the Bhattacharya Lab here at UNLV will be working on?

One of the primary focuses of the lab is developing biomaterials for the delivery of mRNA to immune cells. mRNA has the potential to help with cancer treatment on many levels.

Humans’ immune systems have trouble recognizing cancer in our bodies, but mRNA could be used to deliver instructions to our T-cells to help them learn to recognize these cancer cells. There has been progress with immunotherapy treatments for blood cancers where T-cells are extracted from the body, loaded with the information they need to identify cancer cells, and then put back into the body. But the T-cells have to be given an electrical shock to open pathways for the information to be delivered to them. With all of this manipulation and personalization, the treatment is costly for patients and unlikely to be covered by health insurance. 

 Our lab is working on a nanoparticle – essentially a lipid molecule – delivery system, which could encase and protect the mRNA to make it possible to be administered as an injection. For blood cancers, this could be revolutionary to treatment plans in that it would be inexpensive and have a high success rate.

Can these mRNA immunotherapies be used to fight other diseases?

Once we crack the code for this type of immunotherapy, it will have applications for not only other types of cancer but for other diseases as well. 

Our other focus is on development of an insulin delivery system for people with diabetes that would respond to glucose levels in the blood and automatically trigger or stop the release of insulin to stabilize the patient’s blood sugar. 

This would help with diabetes management by lowering the number of insulin injections needed, cutting out the lag time between the patient learning of an increase in the level of glucose and delivery of insulin, and eliminating the chance for overdelivery of insulin. 

What excites you most about the research you are doing?

We are working with important diseases like cancer and diabetes. If our approach is successful, it will have the potential to impact the lives of millions of patients and on society. 

Also, if we can find success with these methods for these two diseases we can apply what we have learned in other treatments. 

An example of this would be adapting the treatment developed for blood cancer to work with cancerous tumors, and potentially being able to develop an injectable treatment that could eliminate cancer cells left behind after tumor removal without the need for things like radiation and chemotherapy. Another possibility is working on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, which have typically been more difficult to treat due to the blood-brain barrier. Having new and more effective drug therapy delivery systems is paramount to seeing breakthroughs in the treatment of this disease.

What inspired you to get into your field?

I love chemistry, but through getting my Ph.D. I soon realized I needed more to feed my scientific curiosity and also fulfill my desire to help people and have real-world applications. I wanted to solve the problem from the core, not as a doctor or working directly with patients. When I started working on immunotherapies, I knew I had found my passion. 

What attracted you to UNLV?

UNLV is definitely part of a growing research community. My vision for a research laboratory involves improving human life with different engineered personalized medicine systems, especially nanomedicine and mRNA therapy. With the success of the COVID vaccine this research is becoming more common, but no one at UNLV – or maybe even in Nevada – is working on this. It is a great opportunity to grow and be part of a big change. 

Plus, having my own lab is exciting! I have a postdoc working for me and three graduate students starting this fall. Having these resources to continue the work I started at MIT is incredible and I’m excited to see all that we can do to improve treatments of these diseases.