Amin Aalipour

“I love the creativity with synthetic biology. If you don’t have a tool, go out and build it.”

Amin Aalipour is nearing the end of an M.D./Ph.D. program at Stanford University. His work focuses on making immunotherapy, conventionally used for “liquid tumors,” work for solid tumors.

Aalipour is looking to tackle that problem by developing engineered immune cells. In a paper last year, he and his colleagues described fashioning a cancer-detecting sensor out of a type of white blood cell. In colorectal and breast cancer models, the engineered cells migrated to where the cancer cells were and signaled the presence of tumors, even small ones.

Aalipour is also involved in several other projects, including developing cancer-killing viruses to go after solid tumors. One of his long-term goals is engineering immune cells that can continuously monitor and detect diseases for a long time, like a secondary immune system.