Personalized TCR Therapy: From “Impossible” to Proven in Nature Medicine

Personalized neoantigen-specific TCR Tcell therapy is impossible to bring to patients quickly enough!

No – it is possible. This issue of Nature Medicine features a study from Marit van Buuren, PhD of BioNTech SE in collaboration with The Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) demonstrating safety and manufacturability of such a complex therapeutics in melanoma tumor.

Such personalized TCR therapy requires the definition of tumor neoantigens through genomics, prediction of presentation of neoantigens (in the absence of immunopeptidomics – improvement to consider!) and isolation of neoantigen peptide-specific T cells. Definitely a long and cumbersome process only feasible with sophisticated genomics and HLA peptide binding prediction pipelines.

The study comes several years after PACT pharma has shown a first prove of concept which, however, was not feasible and effective enough to make it through clinical development during difficult fund-raising times.

Personalized, autologous neoantigen-specific T cell therapy in metastatic melanoma: a phase 1 trial

Alithea Bio has developed highly sensitive immunopeptidomics methods that can detect neoepitopes in larger number than classical strategies. NeoZoom is applicable to any tumor material and improves detection rates beyond classical shotgun immunopeptidomics. Let us know if you want to study tumors for expression of neoepitopes, we can help.

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