Abstract

Technologies for Personalizing Cancer Immunotherapies

James Heath, Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology (CalTech); Co-Director, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy

Cancer immunotherapy, which has taken virtually all aspects of oncology by storm over the past few years, is based upon using  cellular or molecular therapies to promote tumor cell/immune cell interactions.  At the heart of this therapy are the T cells that actually do the tumor cell killing, and the tumor antigens that are recognized by those T cells.  Recent work has shown that neoantigens play critical roles in many immunotherapy successes.  Neoantigens are tumor antigens that are fragments of mutated proteins expressed by the cancer cells, and contain those point mutations.  They are presented in the clefts of major histocompatibility molecules (MHCs) by many of the cells in the tumor, where they may be recognized by neoantigen-specific T cell populations.  In this presentation, I will discuss how various micro and nanotechnologies are being harnessed to identify, for a given patient which neoantigens are actively recruiting T cells into the tumor, and to carry out a deep molecular analysis of those neoantigen-specific T cells.  I will further discuss how that information can then be harnessed for personalized cancer immunotherapies in the form of neoantigen-based vaccines, or engineered T cell receptor adoptive cell transfer therapies.