Pancreatic cancer accounts for 53,000 new cancer diagnoses and 41,000 cancer deaths per year in the U.S. Patients need effective treatments to save their lives. The new immunotherapy, Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, is FDA-approved for several types of blood cancers. With NFCR support, Dr. Avery Posey is developing CAR T cell therapy as a viable treatment option for patients with pancreatic cancer.
CAR T cell therapy first collects a patient’s immune T cells (disease-fighting cells) from their blood and engineers them in the laboratory with a gene to form the CAR on the T cells that matches and binds to specific proteins (antigens) on cancer cells. The CAR T cells are infused into a patient’s body and then seek out cancer cells with the antigen, mounting a full-blown attack on the tumor.
With the NFCR support, Avery Posey will focus on overcoming two of the major obstacles for effective CAR T cell therapy in solid tumors: Increasing CAR T cell’s ability to reach pancreatic cancer cells and having a lasting cancer-killing function on the tumor.
Dr. Posey is engineering CAR T cells to bind to a protein called CEACAM6 on pancreatic cancer cells and stop CEACAM6’s cancer-signaling power. CEACAM6 also inhibits T cells so blocking it will allow T cells to reach the tumor.
This high impact research is a collaboration between Dr. Posey, an expert in CAR T-cell development, and Dr. Courtney Houchen, a leader in development of human pancreatic cancer models derived from patients’ cancer cells. Additionally, T-cell signaling, dosage, and route of administration will be optimized in order to sustain durable anti-tumor activity.
Impact
Together, Drs. Posey and Houchen will research the effectiveness of optimized CAR T cell therapies in patient-derived models. If successful, these improvements will propel this specific CAR T cell therapy into clinical studies and may increase therapeutic options for patients with pancreatic cancer.
