This Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research) for $642,044 supports research at the University of Washington to engineer synthetic feedback control systems in T cells to sustain anti-tumor immunity and mitigate exhaustion. The research aims to define the relationships between T cell signaling inputs, pathway outputs, and functional responses, and then use this knowledge to design and test prototype feedback circuits that can maintain...
This Project Grant award of $496,391 from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) under the Cancer Biology Research (CFDA 93.396) program supports research to understand how the solid tumor microenvironment impairs the metabolic function of tumor-infiltrating CD8+ T cells, thereby limiting their anti-tumor effectiveness. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will use advanced techniques like RNA-sequencing, lipidomics, and metabolomics to investigate how the tumor microenvironment drives...
This Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research) provides $693,880 in funding to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, WA to develop a new cancer treatment approach using engineered CD4+ T cells. The goal is to create CD4+ T cells that can specifically target the tumor microenvironment and activate other immune cells to attack solid tumors, particularly in patients with melanoma and other cancers resistant to current immunotherapies....
This Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research) provides $415,257 to The Methodist Hospital Research Institute (HMRI) in Houston, Texas to investigate improving the efficacy of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell cancer immunotherapies. The key objectives are to analyze the role of stress granules, which are cytoplasmic compartments that form in activated T cells, in CAR-T cell exhaustion and tumor control. The project will evaluate...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a $604,627 Project Grant (CFDA 93.396 - Cancer Biology Research) to the Trustees of Dartmouth College in Lebanon, New Hampshire. The grant supports research to deconvolve the heterogeneity of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in order to engineer durable antitumor immunity, particularly for solid tumors. The research aims to reveal individual CAR T cell differentiation trajectories, identify engineering strategies to program CAR stem cell-like...
The federal Project Grant award R01CA292664, totaling $1,313,806.00 and funded by the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research), supports the development and clinical translation of advanced chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies for the treatment of solid tumors. The project aims to overcome key challenges in solid tumor immunotherapy by engineering CAR T cells with enhanced functionality, including the use of a novel costimulatory domain (KITV), checkpoint...
This federal Project Grant award of $399,669.00 from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research program) aims to establish the feasibility of commercializing a personalized and multi-targeted adoptive T cell therapy (ATCT) for the treatment of glioblastoma (GBM), the most common and deadly primary brain cancer. The key products/services to be delivered under this award include: Developing a platform to generate potent and personalized GBM-specific T cells in an...
This Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.396 - Cancer Biology Research) provides $626,534 to The Medical University of South Carolina to conduct research on the mechanisms by which transient endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress can enhance the anti-tumor functions of T cells. The research aims to: 1) Determine how carbon monoxide-induced mitochondrial quality control regulates T cell effector function; 2) Examine how autophagy-induced metabolic changes epigenetically...
This $483,041 Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.396 - Cancer Biology Research) to Baylor College of Medicine supports research to engineer transcription factors in T cells to improve their persistence and effector function for cancer immunotherapy. The key goals are to: 1) understand the molecular mechanisms of transcription factor complexes regulating T-cell exhaustion, 2) increase resistance to T-cell dysfunction through systematic perturbations of transcription...
This $497,870 federal Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.394 - Cancer Detection and Diagnosis Research) supports the development of genetically-encoded molecular imaging techniques to non-invasively monitor and track genome-edited immune cells, such as CAR-T cells, in vivo. The project aims to engineer mammalian cells to express bacterial metallophore transport proteins that can bind radionuclide-labeled probes, enabling real-time PET imaging and tracking of the...
This Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, provides $4,069,734 under the Cancer Treatment Research program to develop synthetic metabolic approaches to enhance T cell therapies for cancer. The Georgia Tech Research Corporation will apply concepts from metabolic engineering and synthetic biology over three years to engineer T cells that can resist tumor metabolic immunosuppression, degrade immunosuppressive metabolic byproducts in the tumor microenvironment, and activate synthetic genetic programs in response to the tumor environment. This innovative research seeks to program the metabolic capacity of human cells to overcome a key hallmark of cancer - the altered tumor metabolism that starves and suppresses anti-tumor immune responses. Successful development of these synthetic metabolic techniques could represent an important new approach to improving the efficacy of CAR-T therapies and immune checkpoint inhibitors against solid tumors.