Her first organic chemistry class as an undergraduate was the turning point.
Anna Slezak, who recently defended her doctoral thesis and will officially graduate with a PhD from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago on June 1, had originally planned to pursue a career as a physician. But organic chemistry opened her eyes to a different career in medicine, setting her on a path toward immunoengineering.
“I found myself drawn to materials engineering research, thinking about therapeutic designs that could impact human health on a broad scale,” Slezak said.
She was inspired by research coming out of Prof. Jeffrey Hubbell’s lab, studying how materials can skew immune system function. After earning her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and computer science from Duke University in 2020, Slezak came to PME and joined Hubbell’s lab as a graduate student.
Over the last four years at PME, she’s helped author twelve peer-reviewed publications from Hubbell Lab and has been first author and lead researcher on two of those high-impact papers. Slezak’s focus has been developing material-based strategies that activate the immune system against cancer cells. Typically, the immune system struggles to recognize cancer as “foreign” because cancerous cells are mutated versions of the body’s healthy tissues – but Slezak has been on the search for subtle changes in the microenvironment of cancer cells that could help the immune system discern between cancer and healthy tissue.
By scrutinizing the surface areas of cancer cells in comparison to healthy cells, Slezak has discovered chemical signatures on the surface of tumor cells that could help generalize – rather than personalize – highly effective cancer therapeutics. Due to metabolic changes triggered by cancer cells, Slezak, Hubbell, and collaborators found the surface of tumor cells have an excess number of chemical compounds called cysteine thiols. This signature persists across all cancer types and is found in both animal models and humans.
Leveraging this signature, Slezak developed new polymer-based therapeutic platforms that can bind inflammatory cancer therapies to the surface of tumor cells, stimulating the immune system to fight solid tumors like breast cancer and melanoma or blood cancers like leukemia. Her polymers act like vaccines to enable the immune system to “see” cancer cells as a foreign threat by producing cancer antibodies that trigger immune cells to attack.
Slezak, a Nebraska native, credits PME’s science communication program, where she was a 2023-2024 fellow, as “foundational” in helping her understand and communicate the impact of her research. “It also helped me think about ways my work can be useful and interesting to broad audiences,” she said.
For the last year and a half, Slezak has also been interning part-time at Portal Innovations, a Chicago-based, early-stage biotechnology incubator and venture fund that’s focused on supporting innovation everywhere, not just established life science hubs like the San Francisco Bay area or Greater Boston. In August, she’ll join Portal’s venture team full-time, where she’ll use her know-how to recommend the most promising biotech startups for Portal to back.
She’s looking forward to staying in the Chicago area, where the Chicago Marathon finisher has often enjoyed running and cycling when she’s not been chasing cancer cells on the molecular level.