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Project

Advanced T-cell Therapy for Augmented Cancer Killing ("ATTACK"): next-generation T-cell immunotherapy directed against lymphoid malignancies (FWOAL802)

Adoptive T cell immunotherapy offers great potential for treating a variety of lymphoid malignancies. In particular, it has been shown that T cells specifically engineered to express of chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) can be efficiently re-directed against antigens expressed on lymphoid tumor cells. This has led to robust clinical responses in patients refractory to conventional therapies. Despite this progress, this state of the art immunotherapy is no 'magic bullet' and still suffers from a number of limitations. More specifically, immune escape variants can emerge that are resistant to the engineered T cells. Moreover, infusion of engineered allogeneic T cells can provoke potentially life-threatening side-effects such as graft versus host disease (GvH) or cytokine release syndrome. This project focuses on the development of nextgeneration immunotherapy for lymphoid malignancy using a multi-pronged gene therapy approach to overcome these limitations, while maintaining the therapeutic advantage of using tumor-specific T cells to combat cancer.
Date:1 Jan 2016 →  31 Dec 2019
Keywords:Immunotherapy
Disciplines:Animal morphology, anatomy and physiology