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Engaging a patients own immune system against her/his cancer is the most promising strategy for future tumor therapies. There are more and more success stories of cancer treatments by novel immune therapies (see for example: www.cancerresearch.org/patients).

Our Mission

At TheryCell we are developing a new approach to learn from a patients own T-cells how to direct them against his/her individual cancer. It is our strong belief that following these lines we can implement a new kind of personalized immunotherapy for solid tumors with improved efficacy and safety.

TheryCell coordinates an innovative project to advance TCR-T therapy for solid tumors with partners Charité, HS Diagnomics GmbH, and EPO GmbH

Berlin, October 30, 2023 - TheryCell is coordinating a cutting-edge project together with partners HS Diagnomics GmbH, EPO GmbH and Charité, aimed at developing novel cellular immunotherapies (TCR-T) of solid cancers. A central component will be the identification and preclinical validation of tumor-specific T-cell receptors (TCRs) which are determined for each patient individually.

Building upon a patented antigen-agnostic approach successfully validated in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC), this novel methodology to identify and employ tumor-specific T-cell receptors will now be extended to more solid cancers with high medical need.

The collaborative effort of three Biotech companies and the Dept. of Hematology, Oncology & Cancer Immunology and the Institute of Pathology of the Charité will focus on identifying and validating tumor-specific T-cell receptors for Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC), Colorectal Carcinoma (CRC), and Breast Cancer (BC). This ambitious project aims to advance TCR-T therapies ranging from the selection of therapeutic TCRs to establishing a GMP-compliant workflow for the manufacture of therapeutic doses of personalized as well as off-the-shelf TCR-T cell therapies.

The project is funded for three years by the ProFIT program of the IBB Berlin and the European Union (EFRE, Europäischer Fonds für regionale Entwicklung), underscoring the significance and potential impact of this pioneering initiative.

  

Why Immune Therapy for Cancer Treatments?

The insight that the immune system is capable of eliminating malignant cells has stimulated the development of a variety of immunotherapeutic approaches.

During the last decades, this has resulted in clinically proven treatments for many cancers. Particularly successful and revolutionary was the more recent introduction of checkpoint inhibitors which effectively restore the function of silenced T-cells.

In some of the patients they induce a complete and durable response with the hope of permanent cure. Nevertheless, checkpoint inhibitors show activity only in a sub-fraction of patients and due to their underlying mechanism they increase the risk of autoimmunity.

There is, therefore, still the need for effective treatments with much broader activity and high tumor specificity.

T-cells attacking cancer cell

T-cells attacking cancer cell - © Meletios Verras / Shutterstock.com