pushing boundaries: dr. brian betts

Dr. Brian Betts, Vice Chair of Strategic Initiatives for the Department of Medicine’s Transplant and Cellular Therapy Center at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, found himself intrigued from an early age about what he calls “life on the other side of the stethoscope.” He spent so much time in hospitals as a youth that such a curiosity was all but inevitable.

“Because my dad’s a physician, I guess you could say I grew up in a hospital,” he says. But he was also in and out of the hospital as a patient, having been born with his internal organs outside of his body (“kind of like a starfish,” he laughs, betraying his playful sense of humor). By the time he was seven years old, Betts had been through several complicated surgical procedures.

“I think that whole experience definitely helped me focus on becoming a physician,” he explains, “because it’s different when you can kind of see what it’s like on the other side of the stethoscope. It teaches you to empathize with the patient.”

m. dellas

Immune surveillance

In November of 2024, Dr. Betts’ research team was awarded a $1 million Team Science Grant through The 11 Day Power Play–a Buffalo-based charity focused on fighting cancer in Western New York–to pursue their innovative cancer research.

With the grant, Betts and his team, which includes Dr. Marco Davila and Dr. Shernan Holtan, are making breakthroughs in the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia with a novel cell therapy that aims to target leukemia without ancillary damage.

That ancillary damage is a common side effect in the treatment of many cancers, including acute myeloid leukemia, which is commonly treated with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.

CAR T-cell therapy has been revolutionary in the treatment of many blood cancers over the last two decades. Still, the therapy can be difficult to administer and sometimes high-risk for patients with acute myeloid leukemia, according to Betts, given that the treatment as used today targets proteins found on both cancer cells and the healthy cells around them.

But Betts and his team have identified, through their research, a promising new target. The protein CD83, they discovered, is present on leukemia cells–but not healthy ones. Thanks in part to the Team Science Grant they were awarded last fall, they will begin clinical trials leveraging CAR T-cells engineered to recognize that target, attacking cancerous leukemia cells while preserving healthy ones.

“It’s immune surveillance, in other words,” Betts says. “We take out the middle guy with that surveillance, and allow the T-cell to kill cancer directly. So you have something that’s selective and specific, and doesn’t cause a lot of related toxicity. And that’s the goal.”

The research and clinical trials represent a leap forward in cell therapy and a groundbreaking opportunity to improve outcomes for patients facing acute myeloid leukemia diagnoses.

Punk rock medicine

Growing up, Betts and his family moved around often, the result of his father’s career as a Navy physician.

Some of his most formative years were those he spent in Northern California, mostly in the Bay Area, where he developed a second passion that rivaled his long-abiding interest in biology and medicine: punk rock. Betts fell in love with the indie punk scene as an adolescent, learned to play the drums and found work in radio.

“Early on, I was totally happy doing radio,” he says. “I would have done it as a career. But I think, ultimately, having a dad who’s a doctor, and growing up in hospitals, had more influence. I do feel comfortable here.”

At Eastern Virginia Medical school, Betts–initially interested in surgical medicine, given all the time he’d spent in surgery himself as a child–was drawn to immunology, fascinated by the idea that a patient’s own immune system could play a role in targeting and killing cancer cells.

After residency at the University of Minnesota in 2008, he went on to complete his fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he worked with the pioneering researchers behind the very CAR T-cell therapy at the center of his research and trials today.

At that time, CAR T-cell therapy was still incredibly new–it was, perhaps, a punk-rock moment for oncology, and so fitting that Betts, self-professed “punk rock kid” that he was, would find himself in the midst of this work.

That spirit remains a part of Betts’ day-to-day–he’s revolutionizing the revolution with his own research at Buffalo, New York’s Roswell Park, applying breakthrough research in patient care and the fight against cancer.

Outside of the lab and the clinic, Betts still spends the free time he has pursuing that other passion, music. He and some of his fellow physicians, including his research partner Dr. Shernan Holtan, play together when they have the chance to. His three children have inherited his love for music, too, playing violin and fiddle, cello and bass. The four of them, plus Betts’ wife, with an opera background, have regular “rock-out” sessions at home. (“The whole house is a bunch of music nerds–we’ve got the making of a real family band,” he laughs.)

Music is both a respite from and a complement to Betts’ work at Roswell Park. He has drawn parallels between these two sides of himself, noting that in the same way that punk is all about going beyond the limitations of musical precedent, his research is about pushing boundaries in medicine, applying his creativity and imagining, pursuing, and achieving entirely new possibilities for
his patients.

“This is really the first foray into this area,” Betts says of his and his team’s promising research and upcoming trials using CD83 for the potentially curative treatment of acute myeloid leukemia. “We’re excited about where we’ll be able to take it.”