Navin Varadarajan, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, is known for his research on modifying human immune cells to fight against cancer. Now, Varadarajan is teaming up with a group of Cullen College students and collaborators at MD Anderson to make his research more accessible to the general public through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund video competition.
In June, the NIH will commemorate 10 years of achievement of their Roadmap and Common Fund programs, which are designed to advance biomedical research. As part of the celebration, they organized a video competition for teams to explain their highly technical research in widely accessible and entertaining ways.
The team, which includes Vandana Kaul, Melisa Martinez-Paniagua and Judy Moyes (Cooper lab, MDACC), filmed a two-minute video explaining their optimization of tumor immunotherapy by personifying different T-cell biomarkers as heroes and villains. Varadarajan said he and his team hope that their video will “help explain complicated science concepts to non-scientists and promote interest in and understanding of immunotherapy research.”
Viewers can vote on their favorite videos in the competition through May 7 by “liking” their choice on YouTube. Watch Varadarajan’s video here.