Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Cellular immunotherapies are a novel kind of treatment leveraging modified living immune cells instead of synthetic drugs and have delivered impressive outcomes so far. Their successful applications are continuously extended, improving the prognosis of many diseases.
However, for some cancer entities, the outcomes are relatively bad and reliable immunotherapy options are still lacking.
One example is the pediatric bone cancer Ewing sarcoma, which's mortality rates haven't improved in the last decade.
An other example is the T-ALL that has a poorer overall outcome compared to B-lineage ALL and cannot be tackled by standard of care anti-CD19-CAR T cells.
For these pediatric cancers, we seek to develop new cellular immunotherapy.
We targeting both MHC-restricted epitopes and native antigens generally exposed by the malignant cells but not by healthy tissues. We exploit both TCRs and CARs as receptors for the candidate targets. Further, we apply non-viral introduction approach like orthotopic TCR replacement to insert the receptors into the endogenous TCR resulting with physiological expression pattern.
The resulting products are tested in various in vitro and in vivo models, and therefore will be ready for eventual clinical trials.
