'Boosting Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cell therapy via a synthetic vaccine' - seminar

Seminar by Prof. Leyuan Ma (University of Pensylvania, USA), entitled 'Boosting Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cell therapy via a synthetic vaccine'.

Adoptive T cell therapy using Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cells (CAR T) has made significant advances in the treatment of hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. However, a key challenge remains that a sufficient pool of functional CAR T cells are needed to achieve long-term therapeutic efficacy. Here, I’ll present the development of a synthetic booster vaccine to enhance the long-term CAR T efficacy by vaccine-boosting donor cells through their chimeric receptor directly in vivo. I’ll discuss an unexpected phenomenon that vaccine-mediated crosstalk between dendritic cells and CAR T cells elicited potent endogenous antitumor T cell responses that are critical for treating solid tumors with antigen heterogeneity. Finally, I’ll show a directed evolution-based synthetic ligand (mimotope) discovery platform that can be leveraged to develop a mimotope vaccine for any CAR of interest (US FDA-approved CD19 CAR will be used as an example)