Mikhail Shapiro, PhD

Mikhail G. Shapiro, PhD

Professor of Chemical Engineering and HHMI Investigator, Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Caltech

Institutional Affiliation

Caltech

Languages

English

Education

Fellowships

Biophysics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 2011
Bioengineering, Mol. & Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 2013

Degrees

PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2008
BSc, Brown University, Providence, RI, 2004

Contact Information

Website

Scientific Interests

The Shapiro lab works on technologies to image and control cellular function in vivo using noninvasive techniques such as ultrasound. They developed acoustic reporter genes, which they are using to image tumors (e.g., breast, glioblastoma and liver metastases) and track the activity of tumor-homing therapeutic cells in mouse models. In addition, they developed thermal bioswitches allowing the activity of immune cells to be controlled with mild hyperthermia and are using this technology to activate and potentiate immunotherapy inside solid tumors. Simultanesously, they are using ultrasound to trigger mechanical disruption of tumors and release of molecular therapeutic payloads.

Highlighted Publications

Hurt RC, Buss MT, Wong K, Sawyer DP, Swift MB, Dutka P, Mittelstein DR, Jin Z, Abedi MH, Deshpande R, Shapiro MG*. Genomically mined acoustic reporter genes enable on-demand in vivo monitoring of tumor-homing bacteria. Nature Biotechnology (in press) bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2021.04.26.441537.

Abedi MH, Yao M, Mittelstein DR, Bar-Zion A, Swift MB, Lee-Gosselin A, Barturen-Larrea P, Buss MT, Shapiro MG*. Ultrasound-controllable engineered bacteria for cancer immunotherapy. Nature Communications 13, 1585 (2022).

Bar-Zion A, Nourmahnad A, Mittelstein DR, Shivaei S, Yoo S, Buss MT, Hurt RC, Malounda D, Abedi MH, Lee-Gosselin A, Swift MB, Maresca D, Shapiro MG*. Acoustically triggered mechanotherapy using genetically encoded gas vesicles. Nature Nanotechnology 16, 1403 (2021).

Abedi MH, Lee J, Piraner DI, Shapiro MG*. Thermal control of engineered T-cells. ACS Synthetic Biology 9, 1941-1950 (2020).

Mittelstein DR, Ye J, Figueroa-Schriber E, Roychoudhury A, Troyas-Martinez L, Fekrazad MH, Ortiz M, Lee PP, Shapiro MG*, Gharib M*. Selective ablation of cancer cells with low intensity pulsed ultrasound. Applied Physics Letters 116, 013701 (2020).