BME Student Named Finalist in 2018 Collegiate Inventors Competition

By Liz Sheeley

The National Inventors Hall of Fame has named Jang Hwan Cho, a BME graduate student, as a finalist in this year’s Collegiate Inventors Competition. Cho is being recognized for his work in developing a new chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (CAR-T); the work was published earlier this year in Cell.

“It’s exciting news that Jang Hwan has been selected as one of the six finalists for this year’s Collegiate Inventors Competition,” says one of Cho’s thesis advisors, Assistant Professor Wilson Wong (BME). “His work has the potential to drastically improve the safety and efficacy of cellular cancer immunotherapy.”

The new refined system – called split, universal and programmable (SUPRA) CAR-T – can be continuously altered to target different types of cancer cells, turned on and off, and overall offers a significantly more finely tuned treatment than the current therapies. Cho’s advisors for this work are Wong and Jim Collins (BME, SE), a research professor at BU and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The five undergraduate and six graduate finalists will showcase their inventions at the Collegiate Inventors Competition Expo in mid-November in Washington, D.C. The judges are selected from National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees and special guest judges, in the past including experts from the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the National Institutes of Health.

Last year, another BME graduate student, Ning Mao, won the competition and took home $10,000 for her work in engineering bacteria that stops the progression of a cholera infection.