Project Grant R01DE034360

This federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), under the Oral Diseases and Disorders Research (CFDA 93.121) program, is providing $390,000.00 to The Medical College of Wisconsin, Inc. to leverage single-cell co-culture and gene expression profiling to identify tumor antigen-specific T cells in oral cancer.

The key products and services being delivered through this 5-year grant, which runs from Apr 1, 2025 to Mar 31, 2030, are:

1. Optimizing a high-throughput, single-cell co-culture system to isolate individual tumor-killing T cells and identify their T cell receptors (TCRs).
2. Performing single-cell RNA and TCR sequencing of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) samples to identify a cytotoxic T cell subcluster with conserved gene expression indicative of tumor-specificity.
3. Engineering T cells with the TCRs identified from the tumor-specific T cell subcluster and assessing their anti-tumor functionality in vitro and in vivo using autologous OSCC models.

This research aims to refine the identification of tumor antigen-specific T cells and their TCRs to inform the development of more precise and potent immunotherapies for oral cancer.