Adoptive Cell Therapy: Enabling Technologies for the Next Generation

Our lab has been engaged in the study of tumor immunology and adoptive cellular therapy over the last 18 years. We have focused our research towards an understanding of human T cell biology, anti-tumor immunity and the development of translational strategies which we have applied to several first-in-man studies of adoptive cellular therapy (ACT). We pioneered Endogenous T Cell (ETC) therapy using peripheral blood as a source of T cells for ACT and the use of IL-21 for generating long-lasting central memory-type T cells. Our lab established several protocols using a combination of adoptive cellular therapy and immune modulation (immune checkpoint inhibitors, costimulatory agonists, oncolytic virotherapy) and demonstrated that durable clinical responses can be achieved in patients with refractory solid tumor malignancies without serious adverse toxicities. A major focus in our lab is to investigate combination strategies of checkpoint blockade and adoptive T-cell therapy for the treatment of cancers such as uveal melanoma and pancreatic cancer. A second major focus has been the development of an antigen discovery pipeline to identify and fully validate immunogenic targets for cell therapy.