Optimized T cells for personalized immunotherapy for solid cancer (OptiCAN)

The overall goal of OptiCAN is to overcome the present limitations of CAR T cell therapies and extend their application towards personalized immunotherapy of solid tumors through advanced genetic engineering of patient-derived T cells.

This will pave the way to bring these optimized T cell products into clinical application.We will achieve this goal by testing different innovative approaches for functional improvement of T cells to treat pancreatic cancer and melanoma as model indications.

We willdefine the most-efficient starting cell subpopulation for the generation of effective T cells for cancer therapydevelop the most effective gene-engineering technologies for functional improvement of T cell products by use of innovative adapter-CAR and boost-CAR technologiesapply novel imaging technologies to study the tumor microenvironment and to develop strategies for overcoming its immunosuppressive milieuestablish innovative animal (PDXv2.0) and human preclinical models (tumor slices) to prove the in vivo and ex vivo efficacy of the generated T cellsintegrate the project results into a workflow for manufacturing of personalized cell products (ATMP) for solid tumor therapy in accordance with regulatory and ethical requirementsFrom the results we expect a substantial health impact as the advanced manufacturing protocols for highly effective and controllable CAR T cells can easily be transferred and spread to hospitals across Europe and also be applicable to other cancer diagnoses.