Steven Zanganeh

New Drug Discovery Paradigms

Several years before joining New York Tech, Steven Zanganeh, Ph.D., faced a frustrating reality of his research in developing new cancer treatments: 90 percent of novel clinical drugs that perform well in lab studies fail to pass muster in human clinical trials because of inefficacy, toxicity, and other reasons.

Zanganeh vowed to improve the lab systems that he says contribute to these failures, particularly the nonhuman models that are typically used to study drug responses.

Steven Zanganeh aims to take advantage of tissue engineering to create 3-D engineered human tissue models that mimic native tissue and respond to drugs in a clinically relevant way.

“I became convinced that we could take advantage of tissue engineering to create 3-D engineered human tissue models that mimic native tissue and respond to drugs in a clinically relevant way,” says Zanganeh, who dove into this work shortly after starting at New York Tech in the winter of 2024 as an assistant professor in the bioengineering program within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Zanganeh set his sights on engineering functional 3-D human tissue models to study therapeutic response in metastatic cancer. He began with the colon because colorectal cancer is a major clinical challenge and because his prior work focused on colorectal cancer metastasis to the liver. He also recognized that 3-D bioprinting could enable a realistic, scaled-down gut architecture.