Mark Landon

Class of 2019

Education: BS in Biomolecular Engineering at UCSC; MS in Biomedical Engineering at Cal Poly

 

Biography

Stem and progenitor cells are the only cells in the body that can self-renew and give rise to different cell types (differentiate). Mark believes that using these capabilities to create cellular therapies will produce curative treatments for many grievous diseases that challenge the medical field today. Through understanding self-renewal, differentiation, and immunological memory, Mark believes that regenerative medicine can yield cancer immunotherapeutics that are long-lived, potent, and specific for a given disease. He is interested in using stem cell research to better understand the process of generating mature immune cells. Specifically, he is interested in understanding culture conditions to differentiate hematopoeitic stem cells (or iPSCs) into specific immune cells with high purity. He is also interested in understanding how hematopoiesis can malfunction and give rise to aggressive and/or recurring leukemias. He will use this knowledge to work at a biotechnology company focusing on generating cancer immunotherapeutics for leukemia.

Mark chose to intern at Thermo Fisher Scientific in the Research and Development team under Uma Lakshmipathy. He is working on developing assays to characterize immune cells in the hopes of better understanding the identity, safety, and efficacy of immunotherapeutic cellular therapies before they enter patients’ bodies. These assays can be used for preclinical research as well as by approved products for quality control purposes. Mark’s role in the project was to explore current methods of immune cell characterization, identify limitations of those methods, and develop products to address the limitations.