Q&A with Miao Cao: Boosting the Efficacy of CAR T Cell Therapy for Colorectal Cancer
December 3, 2025Miao Cao, an MD-PhD student at Thomas Jefferson University, is researching chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy for colorectal cancer, the second leading cause of all cancer deaths.
Growing up, Miao Cao was fascinated as she watched her grandmother use combinations of herbs to treat patients in her village in China. But her grandmother couldn’t satisfy her curiosity as to how and why these treatments worked, motivating Cao to pursue a career in biomedical research.
Now an MD-PhD student at Thomas Jefferson University, Cao received a 2025 PhRMA Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in Translational Medicine for her research on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy for colorectal cancer (CRC), the second leading cause of all cancer deaths.
CAR T cell therapy reprograms a patient’s own T cells to find and kill cancer cells by targeting specific markers called antigens on the cancer cell’s surface. Guanylate cyclase C (GCC) is an antigen expressed by nearly all CRCs and a leading target for CAR T cell therapy development in CRC. However, preclinical studies have shown mixed success.
Failure of CAR T cell therapy in solid tumors like CRC reflects in part the loss of target antigens on cancer cells, but the mechanisms underlying this target loss are not fully understood. Cao is studying a novel mechanism by which CAR T cell therapy shapes the tumor environment, causing cancer cells to lose the target antigen, GCC. She hopes to find approaches to overcome this mechanism and improve CAR T cell therapy for CRC.
Watch this video to learn more about Cao and her research.
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