Completed Cancer Infection & Immunity

CAR Therapy for T Cell Malignancies

Funder InnovateUK (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Autolus Limited
Funding £1.7M
Period Apr 2016 — Apr 2018

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A new type of engineered immune cell homes in on cancerous T-cells while sparing the healthy ones. T-cell lymphomas are cancers that arise from the body’s own immune cells. Standard CAR T-cell therapy—which reprograms a patient’s T-cells to attack cancer—cannot easily distinguish between malignant and healthy T-cells, because both carry the same surface markers. This project solves that problem by designing CAR T-cells that recognise a specific molecular signature found only on cancerous T-cells, leaving the patient’s remaining healthy T-cells intact to fight infections. If this approach works in patients, it could transform treatment for T-cell lymphomas, which currently have limited options and poor outcomes. Instead of wiping out the entire T-cell population—as chemotherapy does—this therapy would selectively eliminate the cancer while preserving immune function. That could mean fewer infections during treatment, shorter hospital stays, and a better quality of life for patients. The underlying principle of selective targeting might also be adapted for other blood cancers where healthy and malignant cells are hard to tell apart.

View original technical description
T-cells are immune cells in our bodies whose function is to "seek and destroy" cells which are infected by viruses. Since T-cells actively move around our bodies looking for infected cells, medical science has long tried to make these T-cells attack cancer cells. Because cancer cells usually come from normal cells in our bodies without virus infections, T-cells don't normally attack them. By taking T-cells from a blood sample and "re- programming" them using genetic engineering, medical science has found a way of using T-cells to attack cancer. These engineered T-cells are called "CAR T-cells" and they can be given back to the patient as a drip. Once back in the patient, they "seek and destroy" cancer cells as if they were virus-infected cells. CAR T-cells seem to be a very effective new form of cancer treatment. Cancers can come from any cells in our bodies. Even T-cells can become cancer cells and some of these cancers are called T-cell lymphomas. This project deals with the particular problem of CAR T-cells attacking T-cell lymphomas. Scientists working on this project have found a way of making CAR T-cells that attack the cancerous T-cells but leave plenty of normal healthy T-cells alone.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

HLA-agnostic T-cell Targeting of Cancer
Next generation engineered T-cell therapy for brain lymphoma
CAR therapy for Multiple Myeloma
ICF: Chimeric antigen receptor T cells targeting CD123, CD33 and CLL1 for therapy of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia
Autologous chimeric antigen receptor T cells targeting CCR9 for the treatment of T acute lymphoblastic leukaemia

Original classification

Collaborative R&D

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.