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0:00
Hello. My name is Eric Vivier.
I am a professor of immunology
at the Center for Immunology
of Marseille-Luminy.
I'm also Chief Scientific
Officer of Innate Pharma.
Today, I'm going to talk about
the harnessing of natural
killer cells, NK cells,
in cancer therapy.
0:19
Today, I will try
to show you how
to bring NK cells to the clinic.
You see here an electron
micrograph in which
NK cells, on your left,
are interacting with a
tumor cell, on your right.
There is a synapse
formed between NK cells
and tumor cells at
the molecular level,
and we want to
understand how it works.
0:45
First of all,
why do we want to bring
NK cells to the clinic?
0:51
It turns out that
there is a revolution
in the context of
cancer therapies,
which is immuno-oncology, or IO.
Most of the IO
treatments, so far,
are based on the
harnessing of T cells.
Here, you see a
tumor-specific T cell
that can control a tumor cell.
This can be unleashed by
immune checkpoint
inhibitors, for example.
One can also use CAR T cells
or T cell engagers
to promote, again,
a T cell-mediated
control of tumor growth.
Despite the beauty of
all these treatments,
it remains that less than half
of the patients having cancer
can really benefit from
this IO treatment.
What we want to do
is take advantage
of the knowledge of
immunology from past decades,
that shows us that, in fact,
T cells are not autonomous
in what they do,
at least for most of them,
and they need cells of
the innate immune system
to become effector cells,
and eventually memory cells.
What we want to do here
is to harness cells
of the innate immune system
so that we can have
a double effect.
First of all, as one can see
on the arrow going
down with a plus,
we can take advantage of
the stimulating activity
of these cells of the innate
immune system towards T cells,
so that, now, T cells
are even more efficient
to control cancer.
Also, if we harness cells
of the innate immune system
that have some
anti-tumor activity,
then we have the double effect
that I'm talking about.
This is why we choose
to harness NK cells,
because NK cells
are killer cells
that can directly
kill tumor cells
and participate in the
control of the tumor burden,
but they can also
stimulate T cells.
