Tu80 - Discovery of T Cell Receptors for Adoptive T Cell Therapy Against Solid Tumors

Many solid tumors do not respond well to available therapies and are associated with poor survival. A promising treatment strategy is the adoptive transfer of T cells engineered to overexpress tumor-specific T cell receptors (TCRs). At the heart of this strategy are clinically relevant, safe and functional TCRs specific for antigens expressed by tumor cells. Discovery of TCRs has been challenging in the past due to the low frequency of tumor-reactive T cells in tumor samples and in peripheral blood. Addressing this challenge, ImmunoScape’s discovery efforts are focused on isolating rare cancer-targeting TCRs, primarily by mining peripheral blood samples from healthy donors and cancer patients. Our Deep Immunomics platform leverages a multiplexed tetramer technology that allows high-sensitivity and high-throughput screening of PBMC for reactivity against >350 T cell antigen specificities in one experiment. Downstream single cell sequencing technology enables the combined analysis and mining of phenotype, transcriptome, TCR specificity, and TCR sequence to build our library of TCRs against both novel and well characterized tumor antigens. We will present the identification and assessment of select TCR candidates that validate our discovery workflow and are part of a portfolio of potential clinical candidates.