Two researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have been elected as senior members of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), an organization that recognizes inventors holding US patents and promotes academic technology and innovation to benefit society.

The newly elected senior members are Preet Chaudhary, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and the Ronald H. Bloom Family Chair in Lymphoma Research, and Michael Selsted, MD, PhD, professor of pathology.

“Professors Chaudhary and Selsted are nationally known for their entrepreneurial research, and I’m thrilled to see them acknowledged with this significant honor,” said Carolyn Meltzer, dean of the Keck School of Medicine. “Their discoveries are advancing our understanding and treatment of some of medicine’s most challenging conditions. The clinical impact of their work is significant.”

Preet Chaudhary, MD, PhD 

Chaudhary’s journey into medical innovation began early. As a PhD student in the 1990s, he received patents for his methodological work on drug resistance in cancer cells and the purification of hematopoietic stem cells, specialized cells in bone marrow that are essential for fighting infection and disease. As a postdoctoral fellow, he filed a patent describing a family of proteins involved in the immune response that became the most highly cited cancer-related patent application globally from 1993 to 2013.

Now a physician-scientist and chief of the Jane Anne Nohl Division of Hematology and Center for the Study of Blood Diseases at the Keck School, Chaudhary holds 12 allowed/issued US patents, 16 allowed/issued international patents, and more than 120 pending applications. These are for next-generation treatments, genetically tailored for individual patients, that help a patient’s own immune system target multiple types of cancer—leukemias, lymphomas, multiple myeloma, and solid tumors. The overarching goal is to equip human immune cells to combat internal threats such as cancer in the same way they fend off external invaders such as viruses.

“The human immune system evolved over millions of years to fight off foreign pathogens,” Chaudhary says. “With these new technologies, we’re learning how to redirect a person’s immune system to fight cancer the same way.”

Preclinical and animal studies in the Chaudhary lab have yielded compelling results, with preparations for clinical trials underway. Chaudhary’s latest research, called synthetic immune receptor (or SIR-T) therapy, adapts an existing immunotherapy treatment for blood cancers (chimeric antigen receptor or CAR-T therapy) for use in solid tumor cancers such as prostate, breast, and lung cancer. Supported by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the US Department of Defense, this homegrown USC technology shows substantial promise, and it could hold potential for treating a range of cancers as well as certain autoimmune conditions.

Chaudhary approaches medical innovation both as a clinician and as a researcher. He recognizes the urgent need for new therapies to offer patients.

“Like many physicians of a certain generation, I was trained to look at cancer as mostly incurable, especially the solid tumors,” he says. “But all that’s changing. These technologies are set to revolutionize the treatment of cancer and other immune disorders within the next five to ten years.”

Election as a senior member of the NAI is an added motivation to keep moving these discoveries forward, he says.

“It’s a validation of the work we’ve been doing. I’m deeply honored, and it’s very encouraging.”

Michael Selsted, MD, PhD

Selsted, a physician-scientist and former chair of the department of pathology (2009-2024) at the Keck School of Medicine, has made pivotal contributions to the field of innate immunity, with innovations resulting in 60 US patents, 130 international patents, and another 80 pending applications. His research focuses on defensins, small proteins produced by mammals that act as a crucial first line of defense against infection and disease.

Selsted and his team were the first to identify and characterize theta defensins, a type of protein found only in old-world primates such as baboons and rhesus monkeys. In preclinical models, these proteins have proven highly effective in combating antibiotic-resistant infections and have remarkable anti-inflammatory properties. Their unique closed-loop structure makes these proteins extremely stable and sturdy, equipping them to combat a range of threats, from fungi and bacteria to cancer cells. Selsted and his collaborators are developing synthetic versions of theta defensin as drug candidates for treating rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, sepsis, and cancer.

“We’ve spent the last twenty years producing theta defensins synthetically in the lab and reengineering their structure to create novel drug candidates,” Selsted says. “The work we are doing now is positioning us to pursue clinical trials for several clinical disorders.”

His work on sepsis, funded by the Department of Defense, has shown strong promise for treating bacterial and fungal infections. Preclinical studies for treating cancer and inflammatory bowel disease are also yielding positive results.

“For cancer, it turns out that our compounds work extremely well in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors,” Selsted says. “They could be used to make those inhibitors far more effective in cancer treatment.”

For patients navigating rheumatoid arthritis, the news is equally encouraging. Selsted’s team is preparing for Phase 2 clinical trials of a new injectable treatment.

“If this compound does anything in humans like it does in rodents, it will be a notable breakthrough,” he says. “We’ve seen animals completely disabled by rheumatoid arthritis running around a week and a half after treatment initiation.”

With his research continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1986, Selsted views the NAI’s recognition as a tribute to the science itself.

“I’ve been privileged to contribute to the discovery and characterization of these important proteins over the course of my career,” he says.  “And I sincerely believe that the best is yet to come.”