Aude Chapuis, MD, on Improving TCR T-Cell Therapies for Cancer Treatment
The associate professor in the Translational Science and Therapeutics Division at Fred Hutch Cancer Center discussed her lab’s research on making TCR T-cell therapies more effective.
“I think there's exciting new treatments coming down the pipeline for TCR therapy. I think, for a long time, it's been not as effective as we wanted it to be and there's been a loss of interest in TCR therapy. However, I really think that with these modifications, there's a very good chance that we will be able to target this efficiently. Now, obviously, the counterpart is that up to now TCR therapies have been extremely safe with very little cytokine release syndrome and no neurological toxicity, as seen in the CAR [therapy]. However, we think that it is possible that by adding a signal you're going to actually enhance these side effects, so it will be interesting to watch.”
Currently, there are 2 main approaches to T-cell therapy. The more well-established approach is chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy, in which patients’ T-cells are genetically modified to express a CAR that targets a particular antigen expected to be found on the surface of tumor cells of interest. The other approach is T-cell receptor (TCR) T-cell therapy, in which the natural TCR is used to target intracellular proteins. Substantial research has been conducted on TCR T-cell therapy and has demonstrated the ability of these therapies to produce modest response rates in some cancers.
Aude Chapuis, MD, an associate professor in the Translational Science and Therapeutics Division at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, is currently engaged in research focused on making TCR T-cells more effective. She gave a talk on this topic at the 2024 Tandem Meetings |Transplantation & Cellular Therapy Meetings of ASTCT and CIBMTR, held in San Antonio, Texas, February 21-24, 2024.
After her presentation, CGTLive® sat down with Chapuis to get more of her insight on TCR T-cell therapy research. Chapuis spoke about the strategies her lab is exploring to improve TCR T-cell therapy efficacy and how these methods might incur a tradeoff on the safety profile of this modality.
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