What’s the medical need for allogeneic anti-tumor therapies ? What are the challenges of allogeneic modalities in solid tumors ? Neil Sheppard, D.Phil, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, and Head of the T Cell Engineering Lab (TCEL), at the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies (CCI) at the University of Pennsylvania has a 20-year experience in the field of immunotherapies and vaccines.
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There may be a special niche for allogeneic therapies. I do think there’s room for both. But you know, when you’re diagnosed with cancer and you have a certain lesion that could be surgically removed, and the scheduling for that is typically depending on the nature of your health system.
But hopefully the scheduling for that is treated urgently. And you are scheduled in advance of less urgent cases. And it may be only a couple of weeks until you have your surgery.
Perhaps even less. That’s not enough time to make an autologous CAR-T product. But it is enough time to use an off-the-shelf NK cell or off-the-shelf T cell etc. So yeah, I do think that there are certainly space for allogeneic therapies.
It’s not you know, if you put that directly into the tumor it’s not clear how long the cell therapy would need to survive. You certainly want it to be around to kill as many tumor cells as possible. I think a great hope really in solid tumors is that you break tolerance to the tumor, that part of your mechanism of action will be recruiting an immune response that’s able to address the tumor by itself. Not having to rely on just this exogenous cell that you put in. Because no matter what you do eventually, that cell is going to tend towards exhaustion.
It’s not going to last forever. And perhaps with allogeneic cells it’s safer if they don’t last forever. But you do want them to have that action at the tumor for a reasonable amount of time.