Dr. Steven Millward grew up just south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received his Bachelors of Arts (Honors) in Biology in 2000 from The Johns Hopkins University.

His graduate work in molecular evolution at The California Institute of Technology was carried out under the supervision of Richard W. Roberts. He continued his studies at Caltech as an NRSA postdoctoral fellow with James Heath where he employed in situ click chemistry to design branched peptide affinity ligands. Dr. Millward joined the faculty at MD Anderson in 2012 and became a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Cancer Systems Imaging in 2015. Dr. Millward’s scientific interests include molecular imaging, directed evolution, programmed cell death, and the biology of the blood-brain barrier.

The Millward group uses organic chemistry and directed evolution to image and treat the molecular drivers of cancer. Directed evolution, as the name suggests, uses fitness selection to sieve a very large pool of molecules (up to 1 quadrillion unique compounds) for the handful that have a desired property, such as binding to a therapeutic target. This is similar to finding the key to a lock by making every possible key and then trying each in very rapid succession to find the best match. Previous work in his laboratory has shown that directed evolution can be used to identify small, cyclic peptides that bind tightly to their biological targets while evading metabolic inactivation in vivo. He has used the same technology to identify macrocyclic peptides that efficiently cross the blood-brain barrier. He believes that these peptides can be used as vectors to deliver imaging agents and therapeutics to GBM tumors that are otherwise inaccessible to standard chemotherapeutics.