Date/Time
Date(s) - 26/10/2023
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Title: Delivery vehicles to improve local T cell therapies

Date: Thursday October 26

Time: 1:30pm

Room: ABB 165

Host: Dr. Alex Adronov

Abstract: Cancer immunotherapeutics often show limited efficacy against solid tumors due to transport barriers and therapy suppressive tumor microenvironments (TMEs). Our lab is developing platform technologies to improve efficacy by optimizing local T cell engager therapies and altering the TME environment for adoptive cell therapies. T cell engagers, such as bispecific T cell engagers (BiTEs), that redirect endogenous T cell cytotoxicity towards cancer cells have shown great promise but are limited by short plasma half-lives and poor tumor uptake. Adoptive cell therapies have also shown great promise by killing chemo and radiation therapy resistant cancer cells, but their manufacturing and activity within the TME remains a challenge.

Our lab is focused on the development of new delivery vehicles and therapeutic scaffold to improve T cell therapies, and the development of immune modulating vehicles to alter the local TME. Importantly, the vehicles are being designed for combination with approved adoptive therapies. To improve T engaging therapies against solid tumors, we are investigating intratumoral platform technologies to increase the residence time of T cell engagers by: (1) the sustained release of BiTEs; (2) polymer antibody conjugates for modular T cell engagers (MoTEs); and nanoparticle T cell engagers (NTEs). We are also developing therapeutic polymers for the hypothermic storage of adoptive cell therapies, to simplify shipping and administration, and extracellular matrix targeting vehicles for the delivery of cytokines for TME engineering.