Marcela Maus, MD, PhD, on New Approaches to CAR T-Cell Therapy for Solid Tumors
The Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School discussed upcoming research and strategies to combat present hurdles in the treatment field.
“I think that there's a lot of interesting approaches. I like the dual targeted, next gen approaches, but those are also a little bit earlier in development and in time... It's not like the Olympics where there's a single winner. It's like a marathon with lots of different people running ina race, and there's all sorts of different divisions and winners in the whole thing. Ultimately, of course, we all want the patients to be winners, and get something out of this.”
While chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy has seen success in treating hematological malignancies, hurdles remain to using the mode of therapy for treating solid tumors. Many centers and companies are actively working to combat these challenges. One such company is A2 Biotherapeutics, which has developed the A2B530 CAR T-cell therapy with its logic-gated T-cell therapy platform (Tmod) that allows for the selective elimination of CEA-expressing cancer cells that have permanently lost the HLA-A*02 gene. A2B530 is being evaluated in the phase 1 EVEREST-1 clinical trial (NCT05736731).
CGTLive spoke with Marcela Maus, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and director, cellular immunotherapy, Cancer Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, to learn more aboutnew research and approaches to cell therapy that aim to achieve more efficacy and safety in solid tumors. She touched on a couple of different methods, such as dual-targeting and next gen approaches, as well as logic-gating, the method used by A2 Bio’s A2B530 therapy.
DISCLOSURE: Maus serves as a member of A2 Bio’s scientific advisory board.
