The Wyss Institute is thrilled to announce that Kwasi Adu-Berchie, Ph.D., a member of the Wyss’ Advanced Technology Team working in Immuno-Materials Platform led by Core Faculty member Dave Mooney, Ph.D., has been named a 2024 STAT Wunderkind by STAT News.
The Wunderkinds awards are given annually by STAT News to the next generation of scientific superstars who are doing groundbreaking research but are not yet running their own labs.
Kwasi grew up in Ghana, a resource-limited country where many medical interventions that are routine in other countries remain inaccessible to the vast majority of people. As a child, he suffered from several bouts of malaria, despite the fact that malaria is easily treatable and preventable in other nations. His goal is to develop new approaches that can enhance existing therapies and enable the creation of new ones that can be easily deployed in low-resource settings.
Kwasi’s work focuses on two persistent problems with T cell therapies: growing recognition that T cells’ physical location influences their function, and the fact that T cells are delivered intravenously, which limits their ability to home to their intended tissue type(s). He has been involved in two major projects to address these issues. One project is developing a collagen type 1-based extracellular matrix whose stiffness and viscoelasticity can be tuned independently to generate phenotypically and functionally distinct T cell populations from a homogenous batch of cells. In another project, Kwasi and his collaborators are developing a biomaterials-based T cell depot that can be injected at a tumor site to locally concentrate T cells to the tumor and prolong their protective effects.
