First-year KU medical student named a winner of Lasker Foundation video contest

Dimitri Seneviratne, who will begin his first year of medical school at the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita this month, is one of six international winners of the 2026 Lasker Foundation video contest, the foundation announced today.

Open to early-career medical students and researchers around the world, this annual contest asked participants to submit a two-minute video describing a biomedical research question they are interested in and how it could be addressed to benefit science and patients.

Seneviratne, a Wichita native, learned about the contest this spring from an email sent to KU medical students. “I love creating things, including videos, and I thought it would just be fun to do in my free time,” he said. “I didn’t expect anything of it.”

The idea for his video came to Seneviratne when he was reading an article about a cancer treatment known as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy. In this treatment, immune cells known as T-cells are removed from the patient’s blood, genetically re-engineered in the lab and then infused back into the patient’s bloodstream so they can find cancer cells and destroy them.

CAR-T therapy currently treats blood cancers, and researchers would like to expand its use to solid tumors as well. But there are challenges. Solid tumors are wrapped in a dense matrix that pushes immune cells away. And when CAR-T cells reach their target, they release cytokines, which can be harmful in large numbers.

Also, there are parts of tumors that have low levels of oxygen and deprive CAR-T cells of needed energy. To be effective without being toxic, a controlled number of CAR-T cells need to be released to the tumor in specific areas.

“I was reading and it kind of clicked in my head, ‘it’s kind of like similar issues you see in tower defense video games, where you have to be strategic with where you place your towers,’” said Seneviratne.

In tower defense video games, the goal is to defend your territory by placing structures such as towers in the enemy’s way. Seneviratne liked to play a game known as Bloons Tower Defense, in which the goal is to prevent a wave of colorful balloons (known as Bloons) from reaching the end of a set course by placing towers along the way that pop them.

In his winning video, Seneviratne proposed the idea of using algorithms like those implemented in these games to improve CAR-T cell therapy so that it could treat solid tumors. In tower defense games, algorithms (such as A-star pathfinding and agent-based modeling) find the shortest effective paths to a target. Seneviratne believes that similar algorithms applied to virtual models of a tumor’s microenvironment could help determine where to place CAR-T cells to generate the most effective immune response with the least toxicity.

As a winner in the video contest, Seneviratne will receive $5,000. The videos are published in the July issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation and appear on the foundation’s YouTube channel. He and the other winners also are invited to the ceremony in New York City for the Lasker Awards, the annual prizes the foundation has given every year since 1945 for discoveries and advances in human health.

Seneviratne earned a bachelor’s degree in product design and manufacturing engineering at Wichita State University in 2024. He became interested in medicine after visiting family in Sri Lanka and witnessing the health care system challenges there. He realized some of the same issues exist in the United States in rural and underserved areas.

Seneviratne said he is excited to start medical school at KU on the Wichita campus later this month, and he also is looking forward to exploring options in research. “I haven’t met anybody who is doing any CAR-T cell research yet,” he said. “But I would love to talk with them about if they see any viability in this project.”