Eban A. Hanna was on the path to becoming a pharmaceutical engineer when he was a chemical engineering undergraduate student at Louisiana State University. While a student, he conducted research focused on the development of polymeric nanoparticles to improve pesticide delivery to soybean plants to develop skills he knew were transferable to his career path. However, during this research he soon realized that his interest in process design and development shifted to discovery biology.

After completing his undergraduate degree, Hanna stayed at Louisiana State to pursue a master’s degree in biological engineering. His interests in genetic engineering and synthetic biology eventually brought him to Johns Hopkins University where he met Denis Wirtz, core researcher at the Institute for NanoBioTechnology and Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Wirtz offered Hanna the chance to gain practical skills engineering immune cells better suited to treat solid tumors.

This experience gave Hanna a greater appreciation for cell motility and the clinical prospects of its regulation. Now, Hanna is a third-year chemical and biomolecular PhD student working with Wirtz to improve the efficiency of cellular therapies to treat cancer.

What topic are you researching?
My research involves discovering physical and molecular mechanisms needed to make cellular therapies more effective at treating solid tumors. Cellular therapies, such as CAR-T cell therapy, have been successful at treating blood cancers, but they’ve shown modest positive results for treating solid tumors, which comprise most cancer cases. One of the main reasons solid tumors, such as pancreatic, ovarian, and breast, can be problematic to treat is because a thick collagen barrier surrounds the tumor. It’s like the hard candy coating around an M&M candy. This barrier makes the tumor unreachable by the immune system.

What are the challenges to studying solid tumors?
There is a lack of appropriate in vitro models to determine if cellular therapies can penetrate that thick collagen barrier. Most models involve placing immune cells on top of cancer cells in a cell culture media and observing how well immune cells kill cancer cells. This method is useful for certain research, such as determining the purpose or response of a cell receptor, but it doesn’t provide insights into the therapies’ ability to break through the collagen barrier and destroy cancer cells. This leaves a significant theoretical gap between in vitro models, those conducted outside a living organism such as in a culture dish, and in vivo models, those conducted in living specimens, where the latter is more costly and time-consuming.

How are you overcoming these challenges?
The Wirtz lab has established a 3D model that mimics a solid tumor to help us observe immune cell infiltration to assess the migratory behavior of cellular therapies before moving to in vivo models. The model is a mixture of immune cells in cell culture media on top of cancer cells that are embedded within a hydrogel surrounded by a collagen matrix. This allows us to visualize immune cell migration and infiltration before measuring cell death of the cancer cells at a pre-defined endpoint.

What are the impacts of your research?
If we can help immune cells invade the thick collagen barrier around solid tumors and destroy cancer cells, it may result in making new or current cellular therapies more effective, and therefore increase patient survival rates.

When you are not doing research, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I enjoy watching nature or history documentaries. My favorite nature documentaries involve the ocean since it reminds me of home, The Bahamas, where I’d often see some of the animals portrayed in person. My interest in historical documentaries is very broad and can range anywhere from the Punic Wars to Chernobyl.

Aside from this, I love exploring museums in natural history, art, and more. I’m also known as a renowned foodie among my friends and family and enjoy trying local cuisines.