Chatting With Assistant Professor Steve Hatfield: Collaboration is Key to Advancing Potential New Cancer Therapy in the Industry PhD Program 

Northeastern assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences Stephen Hatfield and his lab are researching T-Cells that hold promise of speeding up genetic treatments for cancer on Friday, Dec. 8, 2023. The goal is to develop T-cells that would be available “off the shelf” rather than having to create individualized gene T-cell therapy for each patient – which takes precious weeks. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University

By Anna Fiorentino  

When the goals of industry and academia overlap, you embrace shared talents, expertise, and resources, says Northeastern’s Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences Steve Hatfield—particularly when it involves costly, potentially game-changing genetic engineering for cancer therapy. And that’s exactly what Hatfield did with rising star Ryan Murray, PhD ’24, MS ‘14 and biotech company Beam Therapeutics. Through Northeastern’s Industry PhD degree program, together they worked toward a common goal of pioneering the next wave of gene-edited CAR-T cell therapy to fight solid tumors. 

“To be able to make that Venn diagram and see where the goals of industry and academia overlap and become mutually beneficial is something that doesn’t happen often,” says Hatfield, who’s worked with five Industry PhD students so far through the New England Inflammation and Tissue Protection Institute. “It’s a huge chance to collaborate and investigate these types of problems together.”  

We sat down with Hatfield to discuss what it was like working with Murray in the Industry PhD degree program, which allows students to advance their career while continuing to work full time by conducting research at their place of employment.  

Anna Fiorentino: Can you talk about the growing number of research collaborations between academia and industry, such as the Industry PhD program?  

Steve Hatfield: Those in industry tend to have a very different perspective than we do in academia. They’re business savvy; we’re looking to understand how stuff works without limitation. But we share the ultimate goal, in this case, of trying to improve cancer therapy, and collaboration gives us resources we may not otherwise have as an academic research lab to try and make that happen. You can’t beat the experience of the Industry PhD for the student. They’re simultaneously getting the academics of a traditional program and the industry experience, and in Ryan’s case, we were able to build that into a larger project with a sponsored research agreement.  

AF: How have you seen the traditional path for a PhD change?  

SH: When I was a PhD student, you’d typically go from postdoc studies right into an academic profession. If you were an academic scientist, it would be difficult to get into industry, and those that went into industry knew it would be difficult to come back to academia. There doesn’t seem to be that stigma anymore. Those lines have been blurred. Now maybe about 60 percent of my students want to go into industry, and industry employees return to complete their PhD. There’s more appreciation of academia from industry and a lot of academic scientists are looking out from the narrow tunnel of their specific domain to apply what they know to other topics. As a result, over the past decade, PhD programs have become more collaborative.  

AF: Why was the Industry PhD degree right for someone like Ryan?  

SH: Ryan came in with vastly more leadership, business, and entrepreneurial experience than the average PhD student. After completing his undergraduate in biochemistry and master’s in biotechnology, both at Northeastern, he worked at various biotech companies, gaining an enormous number of skills. He’s also very business savvy, pays careful attention to detail and has an analytical mind that allows him to perform experiments at a very high level, along with rare big-picture thinking. He’s still exploring different ways of investigating innovative concepts that we developed in our lab. His startup for example, KiraGen Bio, is using machine learning to target multiple (multiplex) DNA edits at once, known as “base edits,” to knock out barriers that prevent CAR-T cells from killing cancer—in hopes of eventually developing the next wave of gene-edited cell therapies.  

AF: Why did Ryan’s research at Beam sync up so well in your lab?  

SH: Ryan’s work was directly in line with what we have been studying for years in this specific immune pathway, so we worked with Beam Therapeutics toward pioneering the first way (through base editing) to eliminate cancer in solid tumors through CAR-T cells. (These gene-edited cell therapies have already been used in blood cancers like leukemia). The benefit is that you can engineer multiple genes within the same cell without compromising cellular integrity, as opposed to shutting down one or two genes with CRISPR/Cas9, which hasn’t fully protected CAR-T cells in the harsh microenvironment of solid tumors.  

And we’re getting closer. One of the main discoveries of our institute by Director Michail Sitkovsky, Northeastern professor and Eleanor W. Black Chair of Immunophysiology and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, is one specific receptor expressed on immune cells that acts as an off switch. When you block that off switch (many others have been discovered), it keeps CAR-T cells, which kill cancer cells, active longer. The problem is that no matter how many CAR-T cells a patient has, the lack of oxygen in cancer cells will keep triggering the switches to turn off, causing tumors to grow. We’ve long known that tumors can poke that off switch, turning T cells off. But our lab’s additional work has established that it’s critical to eliminate both biochemical and immunological barriers in the tumor microenvironment.  We uncovered that hypoxia (the lack of oxygen) within tumors is a major barrier that promotes both biochemical and immunological suppression to prevent successful CAR-T therapies against solid tumors. That’s how, with Ryan and Beam, in human engineered mouse models we engineered out both biochemical and immunological negative regulators from CAR-T cells, so that they kill solid tumors much more effectively. Using base editing technology, we’ve also potentially engineered these CAR-T cells so that they could be “off-the-shelf” as opposed to being patient specific personalized medicine.  

AF: Do you plan to work with Industry PhD students in the future?  

SH: Absolutely. We had strong ties with industry before Ryan, having a sponsored research agreement with another CAR-T cell company, Juno Therapeutics. And the Industry PhD program only makes those industry connections stronger. I now have several Industry PhD students from various companies working in the lab and an interview with another potential match. The PhD Network does a really great job of finding a good fit and making sure that the students and academic and industry advisors understand what to expect.  

Northeastern University’s Industry PhD program is designed to advance the careers of full-time employees with master’s degrees, while continuing to work full time, conducting research at their place of employment. This game-changing experiential doctoral program allows partner organizations to invest in their company’s future leaders, while gaining access to new research and products, and advancing knowledge and their research agendas. Learn more today.  

To learn more about earning the LEADERs certificate or partnering with the PhD Network to host a LEADERs fellow at your organization, contact Wendy Eaton, director of LEADERs partnership relations. 

Follow us on LinkedIn.