When Corina Amor Vegas was just 7 years old, her mother, Esperanza, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Esperanza’s treatment would take over a decade. However, after participating in a clinical trial for a new cancer drug, she entered remission. Today, Amor Vegas is happy to say her mother is doing “very well.” The clinical trial didn’t just save Esperanza’s life. It also made an indelible impression on Corina, leading her to become a medical student and later a fundamental biologist doing research with profound implications for health and medicine.
“It really made a mark on me,” Amor Vegas says. “I saw, for the first time, the value of basic research. If you develop a new therapy, and it is successful, it can impact not only a patient’s life, but their family as well.”
Amor Vegas now heads a lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) that researches cellular aging. They aim to discover potential treatments for age-related diseases. In doing this, they hope to improve human health—specifically, to help people live out their later years in comfort, free from painful disease. “The goal is not to live forever, or even to expand lifespan,” Amor Vegas explains. “It’s to increase healthspan—the number of years that we live in good health.”
Amor Vegas discusses her work during an installment of CSHL’s public lecture series, Cocktails & Chromosomes.
Though Amor Vegas is only four years out of grad school, she has already made significant breakthroughs, including the discovery that synthetically engineered white blood cells called CAR T cells can be reprogrammed to eliminate senescent cells. Senescence occurs when damaged or aged cells evade the immune system’s attempt to clear them from the body. The cell state is connected to several age-related conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, diabetes, and osteoporosis.
“These conditions can be severely debilitating,” Amor Vegas says. “You suffer them for long periods, and your quality of life continues to decrease. It’s painful for the person with the disease. It’s painful for the family. If we could make an impact here, we could improve quality of life for millions of people.”
Fighting disease, not time
Originally from Spain, Amor Vegas entered medical school in Madrid at age 18, spurred by her love for chemistry and biology. While she enjoyed working with patients, she found herself frustrated that many conditions “don’t really have any curative treatment,” she says. “A lot of medicine is just handling the symptoms and making the patient feel better, which is important but doesn’t really ‘fix’ the problem.”
While getting her medical degree, Amor Vegas sought out opportunities to do research on the side. In 2014, she applied for a summer internship with Frederick Alt, a professor at Harvard Medical School and then-director of the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. Alt, impressed by Amor Vegas’ “outstanding record,” accepted her into the program. “She was very impressive in the four months she spent here,” he recalls. “I certainly expected her to go on to a significant career as an independent scientist.”
The experience convinced Amor Vegas to move to the United States and pursue her Ph.D. at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. There, she worked in the lab of Scott Lowe, chair of the Center’s Cancer Biology and Genetics Program and former deputy director of CSHL’s Cancer Center. Amor Vegas also got to work with Michel Sadelain, who pioneered the use of CAR T cells to treat cancer. CAR T cell therapy involves removing a patient’s natural T cells and genetically re-engineering them to produce proteins that kill cancer cells.
In Lowe’s lab, Amor Vegas became interested in cellular senescence. Cells get senescent as a stress response to high levels of damage. Normally, cells will secrete inflammatory proteins as a cue to the immune system that something’s wrong. In young, healthy people, the immune system responds by eliminating the damaged cells. However, as we age, our immune system becomes less responsive. Senescent cells accumulate in the body, causing inflammation, damaging tissue, and eating up nutrients needed by healthier cells.
While reading up on senescence, Amor Vegas noticed some large gaps in the field. First, scientists didn’t have a good surface marker to identify these cells. “That’s a problem,” Amor Vegas says. “If you know a good surface marker, you can isolate senescent cells, pull them out from tissue, and study their characteristics. Without that, you can’t.”
Second, no long-term therapy existed to clear senescent cells from the body. Amor Vegas wondered, if she found a good surface marker, could she go a step further? Could she engineer CAR T cells to recognize and target the damaged cells? “This was an idea that I had entirely on my own,” she says. “It was novel, but kind of crazy.” Amor Vegas’ colleagues were skeptical. They assumed CAR T cells that attacked senescent cells would simply be too toxic for the body. Amor Vegas says she was “stubborn” and decided to do the project anyway.
By 2017, she had identified the urokinase-type plasminogen activator receptor (uPAR) as a surface protein that senescent cells express. She then worked to engineer CAR T cells that would clear out senescent cells with those specific receptors. By 2020, her results were published in the esteemed journal Nature.
Lowe, Amor Vegas’ mentor, reflects on the significance of their findings. “The work represented a new way to eliminate senescent cells and the first effort to use CAR T cells outside cancer,” he says. “Corina is a force of nature, and she was able to galvanize a team and advance the work to succession. She completed her Ph.D. in the shortest time of any student I have had.”
After getting her degree in 2021, Amor Vegas decided that rather than work in someone else’s lab, she wanted to lead her own. Many fellows programs offer such opportunities to postdocs. Not so many extend the offer to graduate students. In Amor Vegas’ eyes, there were only a select few options. She applied for the CSHL Fellows Program, which allows early-career scientists to direct a research program with their own lab and technician while also getting mentorship from senior faculty members. In making the decision, she considered the career trajectories of program alumni.
“Most CSHL fellows have done tremendously well,” she says. “Almost all of them were still in academia, or if they had transitioned to industry, they had amazing jobs. That spoke to Cold Spring Harbor’s commitment to their Fellows Program and was one of the main reasons why it felt like the right place to do this.”
Inspiring innovation in healthspan
Since coming to CSHL, Amor Vegas’ research has focused on cellular senescence in the context of aging. “It’s a process we all go through, but we actually know quite little about it,” she says. “Most of what we know about this process comes from cancer research.” Once again, she hopes to fill crucial gaps in biomedical knowledge.
In 2022, Amor Vegas received the U.S. National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence Award. The award provides promising early-career scientists with federal support to help fund their research. With this support, her new lab has already succeeded in using CAR T cells to eliminate senescent cells in models of fibrosis, cancer, and aging.
One major breakthrough showed that a single administration of anti-uPAR CAR T cells can increase exercise capacity in aged mice and improve metabolic dysfunction in old mice as well as those on high-fat diets. Mice treated with CAR T cells live healthier for longer than those that haven’t received treatment.
Additionally, Amor Vegas’ team has tested their CAR T cells on human cells to make sure they’re safe and effective. Now, the lab hopes to find investors so it can begin clinical trials testing CAR T cells as therapeutics for diseases like liver fibrosis. Existing treatment options are limited, and the disease can be deadly.
Though most of her work has addressed physical aspects of aging, Amor Vegas is also in the middle of a project tackling cognitive aging. So far, the brain data is “super exciting,” she says.
Amor Vegas’ lab is investigating how modified CAR T cells may be used to treat Alexander disease, a rare neurological disorder affecting the brain’s white matter. Video: Google DeepMind.
In 2024, Amor Vegas officially joined the CSHL faculty when she became an assistant professor. Lowe, who also began his independent career as a CSHL fellow, says it’s been “very satisfying to see Corina start her lab as a fellow and then rapidly be promoted to faculty.”
Another big win followed in 2025, as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute named Amor Vegas a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar, providing her lab up to $8.6 million for their research over the next 10 years. Despite this early success, Amor Vegas tries not to dwell on her accomplishments.
“I focus on my science, wake up in the morning, and do what I’m excited to do,” she says. “I think of the next step, not, ‘Where are we going to publish this? Are we going to get this big award?’ I want to do this because I like it. I could be a primary care doctor, and my life might be simpler, but I love what I do, and I try to enjoy that.”
Written by: Margaret Osborne, Science Writer | publicaffairs@cshl.edu | 516-367-8455