The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a 5-year Project Grant totaling $330,942 to The Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford University) to support research aimed at dissecting the intrinsic variability in engineered T cell immunotherapies for cancer treatment. The overarching goal is to develop personalized cellular immunotherapies and associated diagnostic tests to match the optimal engineered T cell to individual cancer patients.
The research plan encompasses three specific aims: 1) Developing scalable pooled screening methodologies to rapidly assay approved and proposed cellular immunotherapy constructs across large patient cohorts; 2) Dissecting the intrinsic variability of patient T cells synthetically engineered with chimeric antigen receptors (CARs); and 3) Determining predictive correlates of patient-specific engineered T cell function using high-dimensional immune cell profiling and clinical metadata. This work will be conducted as part of the NCI's Cancer Research Manpower program (CFDA 93.398), which supports research and training to advance scientific understanding of cancer and develop the next generation of cancer researchers.