Additionally, the Powers lab has a strong interest in personalized cancer vaccines and is pursuing a novel low-cost platform for delivery to patients. Making vaccines that can be tailored to an individual patient’s own disease could lead to the development of disease-specific vaccine-based therapies, especially in cancers that currently don’t have targeted therapies widely available.

In his research, Powers focuses on understanding the underlying genetic mechanisms leading to pediatric neuroblastoma, a rare type of cancer that forms in certain types of nerve tissue and often affects young children. Poor prognosis in neuroblastoma is frequently driven by a gene with the potential to cause cancer known as MYCN. Powers’ research is focused on improving understanding of how this gene becomes amplified and dysregulated, a situation that leads to neuroblastoma.