T-ALERT: Developing an in vitro assay to evaluate the tumourigenicity of human engineered T cell therapies

A team led by Professor Toni Cathomen at the University of Freiburg (Germany) has secured £1M of CRACK IT Challenge funding to develop an approach to evaluate the tumourigenicity of human engineered T cell therapies.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T) cell therapy uses T cells that have been genetically engineered to express CARs on their cell surface to target and destroy cancer cells or to treat auto-immune and inflammatory disorders. A key safety concern associated with the genetic modification of T cells is the potential for the cells to transform and become tumourigenic. Preclinical in vivo studies in mice to assess the tumourigenic potential of CAR-T cells are invasive, require long study durations and are often not predictive of clinical outcome. Developing improved assays to reliably assess the tumourigenicity of CAR-T cell therapies has the potential to replace in vivo studies. 

Collaborating with five industry Sponsors and supported by the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI), the team led by Professor Toni Cathomen will develop a classifier, a tool which uses machine learning (ML) to identify a combination of predictors of tumourigenicity in genetically modified in vitro cultured CAR-T cells. The team has already demonstrated proof-of-concept for in vitro T cell immortalisation, a prerequisite to developing the ML-based classifier.  

Full details about this CRACK IT Challenge can be found on the Innovation Platform website