This Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research) provides $693,880 to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (doing business as Seattle Cancer Care Alliance) to develop a novel cancer immunotherapy approach using engineered CD4+ T cells. The goal is to overcome treatment resistance in solid tumors, such as melanoma, by engineering CD4+ T cells to express IL-12 and IL-18 to activate innate immune cells within the tumor microenvironment. The award...
This $452,544 Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research) supports research by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (doing business as Seattle Cancer Care Alliance) to target regulatory T cells (Tregs) in the solid tumor microenvironment. The research aims to enhance the efficacy of T cell-based immunotherapies for solid tumors by inhibiting the immunosuppressive effects of Tregs. Specifically, the project will investigate how modulating the...
This federal Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Biology Research program (CFDA 93.396) is providing $1,876,547.00 to New York University School of Medicine to conduct research aimed at optimizing T cell receptor (TCR)-CD3 signaling for cancer immunotherapy. The project will use in vitro methods, structural analysis, and in vivo testing to identify TCR mutations that can enhance immune-mediated tumor killing without losing antigen specificity. The goal is to...
This $127,049.00 federal Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.398 - Cancer Research Manpower) aims to define the functional and spatial properties of tumor-specific tumor-infiltrating CD8 T cells. Specifically, the project will:
Generate patient-derived xenograft (PDX) murine models of 3 melanoma patient tumors to test the required diversity of T cell receptors (TCRs) from tumor-infiltrating T cells needed to exert immune pressure on a heterogeneous tumor like...
This federal Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.398 - Cancer Research Manpower) provides $169,344 to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (doing business as Seattle Cancer Care Alliance) to conduct research aimed at improving adoptive cell therapy (ACT) for pancreatic cancer. The key objectives are to: 1) Identify targetable T cell-intrinsic epigenetic regulators of ACT T cell dysfunction in the tumor microenvironment, and 2) Identify targetable intra-tumor cellular...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a $101,856 Project Grant under the Cancer Research Manpower program (CFDA 93.398) to The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York to support research on the impact of genomic variants on T cell anti-tumor activity. The grant funding will enable in-depth mechanistic and in vivo functional studies of single-nucleotide variants in genes like PIK3CD and PPP3CA, which have been found to enhance multiple hallmarks of T cell activity and...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a 5-year, $642,044 Project Grant under the Cancer Treatment Research program (CFDA 93.395) to the University of Washington to engineer a synthetic feedback control system for regulating T cell signaling to enhance anti-tumor immunity and mitigate T cell exhaustion. The research aims to define the relationships between T cell signaling inputs, pathway outputs, and downstream functional responses, then leverage this knowledge to design, build, and...
The federal Project Grant award R21CA286304, totaling $827,942.00, was provided by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) under the Cancer Treatment Research program (CFDA 93.395) to the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. The award is funding research to investigate the role of an inhibitory receptor in regulating the persistence and function of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-engineered T cell therapies for lymphoma. The proposed study aims to...
This Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), under the Cancer Treatment Research program (CFDA 93.395), provides $556,711 to Duke University to conduct research on epigenetic programming of T cells for enhanced cellular immunotherapy against cancer. The key objectives are to: 1) prioritize lead epigenetic targets through high-throughput screening of primary human T cells, 2) identify critical transcription factors and regulatory regions governing T cell exhaustion, and...
This federal Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (under CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research) provides $513,859 to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Inc. in Boston, MA to develop a novel platform for persistent adoptive cellular therapy using hematopoietic stem cell (HSC)-derived chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-expressing natural killer (NK) cells. The project aims to leverage naturally occurring NK-specific regulatory elements to restrict CAR expression to the NK cell...
This Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.398 - Cancer Research Manpower) provides $132,462 to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, WA to conduct research aimed at improving engineered T cell receptor (TCR-T) cell therapy for solid tumors. The research seeks to determine why TCR-T cells form a specific stem-like reservoir in tumor-draining lymph nodes, which differs from the reservoir formed by naturally occurring tumor-specific T cells. The project will evaluate whether activating this TCR-T cell reservoir through vaccination can enhance the long-term persistence and function of the engineered T cells in the tumor, potentially improving treatment outcomes. The award period runs from December 2024 through August 2026.