Aleksander Popel, Ph.D.

A team of computational scientists and cancer specialists from the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have developed a mathematical model to improve the performance of predictive biomarkers for PD-1 blockade in patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). The project builds on previous research investigating whether the presence or absence of specific cells or the expression levels of predictive biomarkers within tumors can indicate a patient’s likelihood of responding to immunotherapy. The findings were published October 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2410911121).

Research Details

The model uses a quantitative systems pharmacology approach integrating patient data, including genomic, proteomic, and radiological information, to provide personalized insights and guide treatment decisions for TNBC patients. More than 1,600 virtual TNBC patients were generated by the model. Using the partially synthetic data produced by the virtual clinical trial, researchers analyzed the performance of 90 biomarkers alone and in double, triple, and quadruple combinations. Their focus was on determining which patients would respond positively to the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab and which would not.

Along with other Johns Hopkins researchers, lead study author Theinmozhi Arulraj, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, and senior study author Aleksander Popel, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, analyzed the data with advanced computational tools, including statistical and machine learning methods, to identify biomarkers to accurately predict the patient’s response to pembrolizumab… Continue reading.

The biochemical mysteries of how cancer occurs, grows, and spreads are areas of intense study in centers and bioscience labs around the world, but engineers also are applying their particular perspectives to understanding and stopping cancer in its tracks.

Aleksander Popel, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is one such engineer. As the director of the Systems Biology Laboratory, he studies the processes and pathways of cancer growth and spread.

In one trajectory, he is developing novel peptide-based drugs to halt angiogenesis, the process by which cancer tumors establish the new blood vessels necessary for them to thrive. Peptides are short chains of amino acids that mimic the body’s own biochemical mechanisms, in this case to prevent the formation of new capillaries. Popel and a fellow Hopkins biomedical engineer, Jordan Green, have formed a company, AsclepiX Therapeutics, to explore the potential of these drugs.