Ryan Hagenson

Program: Computational and Systems Biology

Current advisor: Gautam Dantas, PhD

Undergraduate university: Nebraska Wesleyan University, 2015

Enrollment year: 2024

Research summary
I design yeast-based immunotherapies primarily for colorectal cancer. I have a particular interest in sensitizing immunologically cold colorectal tumors to additional therapy through the use of probiotics.

I engineer probiotic Saccharomyces cerevisiae var. boulardii to secrete immunomodulatory peptides for the treatment of colorectal cancer. Currently, I am focused on using our probiotic platform to sensitize immunologically cold colorectal cancer — which make up around 85% of all colorectal cancers — to additional therapy. As a non-invasive option, probiotic delivery of colorectal cancer therapies could one day be a preferable method to mitigate a multitude of risks and complications from colorectal cancer.

Graduate publications
Guo J, Sarafinovska S, Hagenson RA, Valentine MC, Chen DY, McCoy Iv WH, Dougherty JD, Mitra RD, Muegge BD. 2026 SMURF: soft-segmentation for single-cell reconstruction and topological analysis of spatial transcriptomic data. Nat Commun, 17(1):7990. PMCID: PMC13447825

Wallace MJ, Kratschmer C, Brazil B, Matiker I, Evbuomwan EM, Prusa J, Najari J, Mehta R, Romani A, Zhang S, Ning J, Hagenson RA, Liao J, Wang B, Helmink BA, Dantas G. 2026 A combinatorial construct library enables an expanded expression range of secreted therapeutic proteins by probiotic yeast. Trends Biotechnol, ():Online ahead of print. PMCID: