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Hi. My name is Sebastian Kobold.
I'm a professor of medicine and
experimental immuno-oncology
and vice chair of clinical
pharmacology here
at the university hospitals of
the Ludwig-Maximilians
University in Munich.
Today, I want to tell you more
about how T cells that
have been engineered
either with a chimeric
antigen receptor or with
a T cell receptor work
for cancer treatment.
I would just go
straight ahead with
saying that most of
the talk will be
about chimeric antigen
receptors, CAR,
because they're the so far
only approved treatment
or cellular treatment
for cancer that we have.
That's why I think it's
much more important
to focus on those
than on the TCRs
which are currently
more experimental.
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T-cells are really at the core
of therapeutic
developments in oncology.
The reason for that
is has really been
because it has been recognized
that T-cells are being hampered,
are being suppressed
by cancer cells
in order to give
the cancer cells
the opportunity to
grow and to progress.
Meaning that in a sense,
T-cells have the
natural ability to
become specific against
specific or
cancer-associated antigens.
But the issue is that T-cells
are being suppressed by
the tumor cell to
allow the tumor cell
freedom to grow and
to metastasize.
But it has been recognized
that in this sense,
two molecules seem to be very
important to suppress
T-cell activity in cancer,
which is the Programmed
Death Receptor 1
and the Cytotoxic T-lymphocyte
Antigen 4, CTLA-4.
One of the big parts of the
advances in oncology in
the recent years has been that
if you block either
of those pathways by,
let's say monoclonal antibodies,
as depicted on the slide,
you can actually reinvigorate
T-cell responses
and enable them to recognize
cancer cells again.
This has really been a
paradigm shift in oncology,
because now, for the first time,
we really had a
drug or a modality
that is not targeting
the cancer cell at all,
but targeting only immune
cells or T-cells in this case.
By doing so, they re-enable
the immune system
to recognize cancer cells
and to be therapeutic.
So in a sense,
T-cells have become
premium or prime
anticancer weapons.
At the core of this recognition
stems the following idea.
