Giedre Krenciute, PhD, on Revitalizing T-cells in CAR T-cell Therapy

"The struggle here is moving all this research to clinical trials and how many of them we can test. And that will be huge. Because once we test something, hopefully, we'll know if it's working or not. Until then, we’re just making educated guesses of what will work. There's a lot of great ideas and all of them show promise. But I think we were making good strides towards clinical trials.”

T-cell exhaustion remains an obstacle to producing durable cell therapies in many indications, especially with autologous therapies in patients whose T-cells may already be stressed. A session at the 64th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting, held December 10-12, 2022, in New Orleans, Louisiana, focused on preclinical strategies to overcoming T-cell burnout and exhaustion. Giedre Krenciute, PhD, assistant member, bone marrow transplantation and cellular therapy, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, gave a talk on revitalizing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells.

CGTLive spoke to Krenciute to learn more about the preclinical research presented by her and other presenters that addressed T-cell exhaustion. She discussed her work knocking out DMNT3A and the positive preclinical data seen in the resulting cells, as well as the talk by Evan Weber, PhD, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, on other strategies to improve CAR T-cells.

Click here to read more coverage of the ASH 2022 meeting.

REFERENCE

Krenciute G. CAR-T cell dysfunction: Revitalizing the living drug. Presented at: 64th ASH Annual Meeting, December 10-12, 2022, New Orleans, Louisiana. Overcoming T-cell burnout and exhaustion session.