Steven Conolly awarded 2022 Bakar Prize

EECS and Bioengineering Prof. Steven Conolly has been awarded the 2022 U.C. Berkeley Bakar Prize.  This prize is given annually to former Bakar Program Fellows whose technological innovations promise to deliver solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.  Funds are provided to help new technologies transition from an academic setting to industrial applications.  The objective of Conolly’s project, titled Rapid in vivo optimization of solid tumor CAR-T cell therapies using advanced magnetic particle imaging (MPI),  is to determine whether a particular CAR-T cell cancer immunotherapy is working in hours rather than months.  CAR-T cells are tagged with safe magnetic nanoparticles before a treatment is administered so that oncologists can view how well they are targeting cancer cells using high resolution imaging technology.