"Multitasking Anti-cancer Biotherapeutics"

K. Dane Wittrup, PhD
Professor
Department of Biological Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Combining multiple binding domains into single macromolecular assemblies enables novel approaches to cancer therapeutic development. Examples of such multispecific strategies will be presented, including: pretargeted radioimmunotherapy; triepitopic receptor clustering and downregulation; and targeted endosomal potentiation for macromolecular payload release. The primary synthetic approach is to use combinatorial libraries of protein displayed on the surface of yeast cells, and to select the desired binding properties by directed evolution. A common analytical thread throughout this work is to formulate simple, reductionist kinetic schema for these complex systems that help to elucidate key parameters and rate processes.

K. Dane Wittrup is the C.P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biological Engineering at MIT and Associate Director of MIT’s Koch Institute. In 2012, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011. Wittrup is co-founder and acting Chief Scientific Officer at Adimab and is a fellow of the American Institute of Biomedical Engineers. He has also served as the J. W. Westwater Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biophysics, and Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He previously worked as a postdoctoral research associate in Amgen’s Yeast Molecular Biology Group. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of New Mexico.