Zelvera Usheva

My project is developing a safer and more accessible way to deliver CAR therapies—treatments that use chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), which are synthetic receptors that reprogram a patient’s immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells. Current CAR therapies are highly effective against certain blood cancers, but they require removing immune cells from the patient, engineering them in specialized laboratories, and infusing them back – a process that is slow and costly, limiting who can access treatment. Delivering CAR therapies directly inside the body could overcome these barriers, but requires precise control to ensure the therapy activates only in the intended immune cells and remains inactive in others. To address this challenge, my project explores how naturally occurring molecular differences between cell types can be used to create built-in safety switches that guide where and when CAR activity occurs. By embedding these molecular controls into CAR designs, the project aims to safely target cancer cells, minimize effects on other cells, and replace complex ex vivo manufacturing with a faster, safer, and more accessible approach to delivering.