Biotech Strategy Blog

Commentary on Science, Innovation & New Products with a focus on Oncology, Hematology & Cancer Immunotherapy

Posts tagged ‘CAR T cells’

Wow I wished I’d thought of this!

View from Perdido Bay to Orange Beach

The sun is setting on the year end and the 2023 Holiday season brings our cancer conference coverage to a close until the new year.

Before we go, I wanted to end with a bang and highlight some really stunning and thoughtful research.

It was just published and is an absolutely amazing piece of thinking and execution.

Some of the best ideas come about in oncology R&D when we make the most of what’s already available biologically then borrow the concept so it can be applied therapeutically.

Rather than push the proverbial rock up the hill like Sisyphus, why not simply nudge it off the top and let nature take its course?

Sometimes even scientists are guilty of over-thinking things.

In this elegant work, the findings may well change the way we think about tackling some difficult to treat solid tumours going forward…

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Same Controller, Opposite Outcomes

Immune cells look and act differently

In this latest post from the American Society of Hematology meeting we explore some of the scientific data emerging from San Diego.

Specifically, we are looking at how transcription factors such as TOX2 can drive divergent fates in T and NK cells.

It might be tempting to think it sounds a bit dry, yet the findings could have important implications for future therapeutic developments – especially in the design of novel chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) cell therapies, an area where CAR-NK cells have constantly struggled with poor persistence.

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SITC23 Scorecard for emerging novel IO therapies

Every year post SITC we offer a critique and short reviews with a running scorecard of some of the emerging new developments, which captured our attention.

Time for some new directions?

When going through this process some years we barely managed to find half a dozen promising yet early gems – the good news is we have ten to share plus four additional ones to be covered in separate company interviews.

So what was interesting this year – and just as importantly – why was it intrguing, and what does it all mean?

The good news is there are some really creative and fresh ideas coming down the pike replacing others likely to fade away quietly to dog drug heaven…

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What will novel CAR-T cells look like in the future?

In a few years time the next generation CAR-T cell therapies are going to look and behave very differently from the somewhat crude versions we use in the clinic today, making them more akin to the homemade wooden go-carts of our misspent youth.

This is what science and technology is all about improvisation and innovation to create something bigger, better, faster, or even safer than what went before.

It’s a rite of passage just as many Dads and siblings went through numerous iterations of building go-carts, so too will we see a similar evolution in this cell therapy niche, although obviously more rapidly and on a much grander scale than those humble efforts to improve the speed or manoeuvreability we were all ardently obsessed with. Brakes, I have to admit didn’t even come into the equation until much later when a near-miss got us all grounded, but oh the fun we all had in the process!

If we want to improve the selectivity and killing capacity of the new CARs in both liquid and solid tumours, what practical aspects ought to be considered and how is synthetic biology going to get us there?

In our expert interview, we sought to learn how an expert in the field saw how things might be changing and where they could be shifting…

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Dark Knight Rising

Rotterdam harbour

In the latest installment of our CAR-T cell mini-series, we take a look on the ‘dark side’ as we switch from liquid to solid tumours.

We have made some great progress in leukemia, lymphomas, and even multiple myeloma while solid tumours have presented a much greater challenge for the field.

There have been some helpful developments over the last few years relevant to this front, however, although when each is seen in isolation, the potential may not be apparent.

Here we look at the bigger picture and highlight important areas, which could lead to some surprising new developments emerging over the next few years…

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Cool and emerging new concepts to watch out for in Gliomas

Rotterdam harbour where even the architecture can look like CAR-T cell constructs!

For decades four tumour types always seemed to be considered the ‘graveyard’ of drug development with many a promising therapy hitting the skids and being banished to dog drug heaven…

  • Metastatic melanoma
  • Small cell lung cancer (SCLC)
  • Acute myeloid leukemia (AML)
  • Glioblastoma (GBM)

Of these, melanoma has been dramatically transformed by targeted therapies and checkpoint blockade, while AML has come of age with novel targeted therapies being approved for specific subsets and many more in development, and even SCLC has seen some success with both immunotherapy and targeted approaches.

This leaves us with refractory GBM as the main holdout and a 5% survival rate at five years post diagnosis.

The good news is there are various novel approaches coming through the clinic and more in preclinical development, some of which might well move the survival needle if all goes well.

In order to see improved success in the clinic though, we first have to marry the novel ideas with a greater understanding of the inherent challenges and hurdles we wish to address.  There are plenty of smart and articulate people quietly working at the coal face in various brain tumours with some intriguing ideas being evaluated going beyond the obvious.

In our latest BSB interview we talk to one of the experts in this niche and discuss the challenges, opportunities, and importantly – where is the field moving towards…

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Tilting at windmills

Sometimes I wonder when we are faced with particularly difficult challenges in oncology – there are certainly plenty of these to go around – if people give up before they start and consider certain endeavours far too difficult and thus any emergent approaches are considered tilting at windmills.

What if we could isolate and define the problem more specifically, thereby identifying where new targets might lie and then go about designing ways to tackle them?

When we do this the problem at hand is much more specific and less amorphous.

Here, we highlight and explore a key topic likely to be lurking in many abstracts over the next week across both hematologic malignancies and solid tumours alike… it’s an important subject many will ignore at their peril.

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5 strategies for overcoming challenges to CAR-T cells in solid tumours with CAR-T cells

It’s time to talk about tackling solid tumours with CAR-T cell therapies.  In the past, this has been a challenging area with few or modest responses seen in people with advanced cancers.

As researchers go back to basics and think about both improving on the CAR construct design as well as fine tuning of the various elements, I am pleased to say things are finally looking a bit more upbeat on both sides of the pond.

Here we describe five very different strategies research groups are taking with a variety of different solid tumour targets and cancer types.

Some of these examples are already being evaluated in early stage studies in the clinic, while others have gone through their paces in terms of optimising performance and are about to head in this direction…

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Is the future of CAR T cell therapy beyond Oncology?

At the #CART22 meeting jointly run by EHA/EBMT, one of the sessions yesterday attracting a lot of interest and attention was one on the application of CAR T cell therapy beyond hematologic malignancies and solid tumours.

In a world where academic medicine is increasingly the domain of sub-specialists, as it is in many professions, it was refreshing to see the organizers of the meeting think ‘outside the box’ and offer the opportunity to hear speakers you wouldn’t typically expect at a meeting organized by hematology focused organizations.

Is the future of CAR T cell therapy, to paraphrase the oft-quoted Star Trek introduction, to seek new frontiers and boldly go where T cells have not gone before?

In this post we take a look at some of the data presented and offer our perspectives.

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The Future of Cell and Gene Therapies

Who’s going to be flying high in the cell and gene therapy niche and why?

It’s time to switch horses and start thinking about cell therapies again…

Essentially what we have on deck today is a bakers dozen i.e. thirteen different categories exploring the future of gene therapy and cell therapy approaches and how they might make an impact in the medium term future.

There will likely be many others coming along too – something we plan to write about from the upcoming ASGCT meeting next month.

If we take stock there’s plenty of cool or innovative ideas already being explored or about to make a splash, including one company many BSB readers may not have heard about plus a new biotech company coming out of stealth mode… who are they and what are they all about?

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