Dr. Kevin Curran is a pediatric oncologist who specializes in bone marrow transplants and in the development of novel treatment approaches for leukemia and lymphoma that do not respond to current therapies. Specifically, he and his colleagues use

genetic manipulation of immune cells to recognize and kill cancer cells.

That approach is a budding treatment called CAR-T, which uses the body’s own immune system to fight the cancerous cells attacking it. The problem is that cancerous cells, though deadly, are effectively invisible to the body’s white blood cells, our natural defense mechanism against viruses and bacteria. What makes this treatment so unique and experimental is that Curran and others who are on the front lines actively remove billions of white blood cells, genetically modify them, and return them to the body so they can recognize cancer when they encounter it. Curran likens it to giving the blind back their sight. “The cells, they want to find the cancer, they just forgot how to do it,” and blind cells can’t find and kill what they can’t see, so Curran is working on ways to genetically engineer white blood cells to learn how to see that cancer both exists and is bad.

He undertook a four-year trial that treated 25 patients with a 75 percent success rate, and several drug companies will have products on the market as a direct result of Curran’s research.

“We have now shown this proof of principle,” he says. “So now we need to figure out how to work it for five cancers, ten cancers, fifteen cancers, and not just for kids. We need to make it work for adults, too. We have to have them work better with less toxicity so that people don’t have to have three years of treatment or have a lot of side effects or have long-term side effects. That is our vision, our dream.”

Curran has been working towards this goal since high school when he saw how talented and happy his pediatrician was, he says. He earned his M.D. at Georgetown University, where he decided to specialize in oncology. He did his residency at Tufts Floating Hospital and afterward joined Sloan Kettering.

He grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of two Irish emigrants, both from Kerry, who met in Boston. His mother, Eileen O’Sullivan, is from Castleisland, and his father, Liam, is from Ballyferriter, where the Curran family farm remains today with many extended Irish relatives. It was there, in fact, where he proposed to his wife, Kathleen. Today they have two sons, Liam and Declan.

“Education was definitely something that was instilled by my family and by my community,” he says. “My father worked for the gas company driving a front loader, literally digging holes and putting in gasoline, and he did that for thirty-five years, and my mother was a homemaker.

“Sometimes my dad says, ‘How come you are not a regular doctor? What is all this research business?’”  ♦