The Bhatia Lab is developing a modular nanoparticle system to make immunotherapy more accessible and effective across a wider swath of cancer patients. Their tumor-targeting and membrane-penetrating peptides deliver small pieces of DNA to amplify the body’s immune response to tumors and boost the effectiveness of immunotherapy drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors. By combining the particles with the checkpoint inhibitor antibody in mouse models of cancer, researchers were able to halt cancer progression and generate a systemic response against treated and untreated tumors. The work, published in PNAS, was supported in part by the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine.