Could targeting Regulatory T cells be a game changer?
Casa Milà, Barcelona
One of the pleasures of going to international cancer immunotherapy conferences is the opportunity to meet great scientists such as Sergio Quezada, PhD. He’s a Professor of Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy at University College London (UCL) Cancer Institute.
After his PhD, he joined the laboratory of Jim Allison at MSKCC in 2004, and as we heard from Nobel Laureate Sir Richard Roberts FRS on the last episode of the Novel Targets Podcast (Link), working in the laboratory of a future Nobel Laureate is one of his 10 tongue in cheek suggestions to improve your chances of winning a Nobel prize!
Professor Quezada kindly spoke to BSB last week at the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) “Defense is the Best Attack” conference.
In Barcelona, we talked about the research done by his UCL group into regulatory T cells (Tregs) that led to the development of a novel first-in-class Treg depleting anti-CD25 antibody.
As Prof Quezada told BSB:
“This was the dream. It was basic biology, a big curiosity, lots of basic biology and being very stubborn and lots of luck. And now we have something that came out of PhD students and postdocs that some medic or nurse is gonna be injecting at the end of the year into a patient, so it’s really exciting. It’s really, really exciting!”
We enjoyed talking with Prof Quezada and appreciated the perspicacious insights he shared on where we’ve come from and where we may be going.
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Today’s daily highlights post offers a few of my “take homes” from this afternoon. It doesn’t discuss unpublished data but some of the presenters went into more detail about posters they are presenting later this week which was interesting.