Shortly after Adrian Johnston, Phd ’24, finished his freshman year of high school, his father lost his battle with cancer.

Unmoored for a while, Johnston eventually found his footing in the sciences as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland. He decided then that he’d work to fight the often deadly disease.

Last April, Johnston founded DUA, an early-stage startup that continues the work he pursued at Johns Hopkins during his doctoral studies in chemical and biomolecular engineering. His PhD thesis reported that novel CAR T-cell immunotherapy shows early promise for treating solid tumors like breast, lung, and stomach cancers, among others. That’s notable because solid tumors, unlike blood cancers, have until now been highly resistant to immunotherapy.

The effectiveness of this approach stems from his invention, velocity receptors, which are special protein molecules that can move therapeutic cells to a targeted tumor. “If you imagine us as the therapy cell, the velocity receptors are like our feet.

They help us get to where we need to go,” Johnston explains. Johnston’s father was Ghanaian and settled in Sierra Leone before emigrating to the United States. The name DUA, or “tree” in Ghanaian, is often associated with “grow.” “My goal with DUA is to grow hope and peace, both of which my father had in short supply in his final days,” Johnston says.

His father’s passing has made Johnston more attuned to the importance of people and community. “It’s the people I get to help, the people I’ve been blessed to have been mentored by, the people I work with, that have made me the person I am today,” he says.

At Johns Hopkins, the opportunity to develop such bonds was born through Explore Hopkins, a weekend-long program that encourages prospective students from underserved communities to explore doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins. Johnston remembers visiting the research lab of K.T. Ramesh, the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Professor of Science and Engineering.

“Unplanned, he took us on a tour of his labs. Walking through the campus in the evening, then through the old historic architecture of Latrobe Hall felt like a movie, something like The Social Network,” Johnston says. “When he showed us around his labs and the work he was conducting, it felt real—like serious work was being done that directly impacts our everyday lives.”

Story from the winter 2025 edition of the JHU Engineering Magazine.