Marcela Maus, MD, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital receives three-year research grant from ACGT.
STAMFORD, Conn., Oct. 29, 2025 — A $500,000 grant from Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy (ACGT) will support Massachusetts General Hospital scientists who are probing the use of in vivo CRISPR screening to improve CAR T cell therapy in pancreatic cancer.
The grant was awarded to Marcela Maus, MD, PhD, who is the Paula J. O’Keeffe Endowed Chair and Director of the Cellular Immunotherapy Program at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, and the Associate Head and Head of Cell Therapies at the Mass General Brigham Gene & Cell Therapy Institute. She is also a Professor of Hematology and Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
A mentee of cell and gene therapy pioneers Carl June, MD (University of Pennsylvania) and Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD (Columbia University), Dr. Maus has dedicated her career to furthering research into the efficacy of CAR T cell therapy, heading her own laboratory at Mass General to design and evaluate next-generation T cells.
This latest grant from ACGT will support Dr. Maus’s research into using a CRISPR tool to create a screening process that can help identify necessary changes to CAR T cells to make them more effective in solid tumors.
Solid tumors have proven more difficult to treat with cell and gene therapy because they are less accessible to immune cells. Dr. Maus is building on past research that identified ways to alter CAR T cells to be more effective against pancreatic cancer.
“We recently published on testing a wide variety of modifications to CAR-T cells using CRISPR gene editing that enhanced their ability to control tumors in multiple myeloma, and we are working on a similar approach in pancreatic cancer,” Dr. Maus said. “What’s interesting is that the best modifications to make seems to differ in pancreatic cancer, and the research proposed here is to test not only one modification at a time, but groups of modifications in each CAR-T cell. We also want to test this in models where the target of the CAR-T cells is present at varying levels, because we think that represents patient tumors more faithfully. We hope that building on this knowledge base will enable us to take the most optimal approach forward with the highest likelihood of benefit in patients suffering from pancreatic cancer.”
Funding from ACGT will help generate the necessary processes, procedures and materials needed to test these engineered CAR T cells in a pancreatic cancer clinical trial and further improve the CRISPR screening tool.
“Dr. Maus is one of the most talented and promising researchers driving the field of CAR T cell therapy forward,” says Kevin Honeycutt, ACGT chief executive officer and president. “Pancreatic cancer is a very aggressive and difficult-to-treat form of cancer, but we believe her line of research has the potential to make a major difference. We are excited to support Dr. Maus’s clinical research and believe in its potential to treat pancreatic cancer.”
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Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy (ACGT)
For nearly 25 years, Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy (ACGT) has funded scientific research to bring innovative treatment options using cancer cell and gene therapy to people living with deadly cancers. These treatments continue to save the lives of many blood cancer patients and offer new hope to all people diagnosed with cancer. ACGT is currently focused on funding talented visionaries whose scientific advancements are driving the development of groundbreaking treatments for solid tumors, including those most difficult to treat, such as brain, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers.
100% of all public donations raised by Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy directly support research and programs. For more information, visit acgtfoundation.org, call (203) 358-5055, or join the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy community on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.
