Q&A with Chaithanya Vedula: Searching for Shapes and Cancer Clues Under the Microscope

When you spend as much time as Chaithanya Vedula does looking through a microscope, you start to see things. This nucleus looks like a heart. That cell looks like a face.

“I always think of it like cloud-gazing, except at a cellular level,” said Vedula, a PhD student at Boston University. Sometimes he even takes pictures of these shapes to turn into holiday cards.

That sense of creativity carries over into Vedula’s research. He received a 2026 PhRMA Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in Drug Discovery for his project studying a promising therapeutic target for cancer, a protein called KIF18A.

Normal cells don’t need KIF18A to survive, but cancer cells do. Because cancer cells often have an abnormal number of chromosomes, they rely on KIF18A to stabilize and reproduce. Inhibiting KIF18A could impair cancer progression without damaging healthy cells.

However, some cancers have shown resistance to therapies that inhibit KIF18A. Vedula aims to figure out why and how to overcome this resistance to help establish KIF18A as an essential first-line chemotherapy.

Watch this video to learn more about Vedula and his research.