logo
 

Our ‘Research In Practice’ profiles bring you original content - from interviews and posts, to exciting and interactive live events focused on latest trends and findings in translational medicine.

 

This September,  ‘Research in Practice in Cancer’ presents a 3-part series on  ‘T Cells and Cancer’.  Join our second episode on 13th September at 1pm BST / 12pm GMT with Prof Karine Breckpot Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Sign up here to receive email reminders for this series.

 

What are we going to talk about in this episode?

 

The potential of personalized cancer immunotherapy using neoantigens has been highlighted by an increasing number of preclinical and clinical studies that show promising T cell responses. It has been shown in various clinical trials that mRNA-engineered monocyte-derived dendritic cells (moDCs) are potent antigen-presenting cells that can activate antigen-specific T cells.

 

The study discussed in this talk optimized the manufacturing process of a cancer vaccine consisting of mRNA-modified, neoantigen-presenting moDCs, making it fully GMP compliant, allowing flexibility and the possibility of automation. Monocytes were obtained by apheresis and differentiated ex vivo into moDCs. These were electroporated with two types of mRNA to generate the cancer vaccine designated TetraMixDC-NEO. The first type of mRNA encoded a single neoantigen (SNA), manufactured using an in-house developed proprietary synthetic DNA template, a flexible, time and cost-efficient strategy to encode and deliver SNA in an mRNA format. The second type of mRNA encoded TetraMix mRNA, a mixture of mRNA purposed to increase the T-cell activating capacity of moDCs, manufactured using a plasmid DNA template. Electroporation of moDCs with TetraMix mRNA induces differentiation of the cells towards potent antigen-presenting cells. Preclinical data showed that mRNA coding for a SNA was presented to T cells by TetraMixDC-NEO inducing IFN-γ secreting and cancer cell killing T cells. These promising preclinical data will be further validated in a phase I clinical trial in patients with metastatic microsatellite stable colorectal cancer (EudraCT 2021-003303-17), potentially paving the way for similar cancer vaccines in other cancer types that currently do not benefit from standard-of-care therapy. 

 

Series programme:

 

  • 2nd September, 10am BST / 9am GMT - ‘T cell immunological research at the forefront of defeating cancer’ with Dr Vivian Dimou,  The Institute of Cancer Research 

 

  • 13th September, 1pm BST / 12 pm GMT - ‘Activation of Neoantigen Specific T cells for the Treatment of Solid Tumors’ with Prof Karine Breckpot Vrije Universiteit Brussel

 

  • 22nd September, 1pm BST / 12 pm GMT - ‘Engineering T-cells for the Treatment of Solid Tumours’ with Dr Ben Draper,  UCL   

 

Please follow Researcher Live’s profile ‘Research In Practice in Cancer’ for interview content, relevant posts, and future event series!

 

 

If you'd like to present at your own Researcher Live event, please email kristine.lennie@researcher-app.com 

.

Date and Time
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
01:00 pm BST / 12:00 pm GMT
Speakers Avatar Prof Karine Breckpot Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Prof Karine Breckpot (°1976, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4331-3480) obtained a MSc in Biomedical Sciences in 1998 and a PhD in Medical Sciences in 2004, all at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB, Belgium). Following a postdoctoral stay at the Division of Infection and Immunity at the University College London (United Kingdom), she became a group leader and Assistant Professor in 2010 at the Laboratory for Molecular and Cellular Therapy (LMCT), VUB. She became a Tenured Professor in 2014 and Full Professor in 2019 at which point she became director of the research group LMCT (https://lmct.research.vub.be).

Her research is focused on cancer immunology and immunotherapy, designing novel immunotherapies focused on T-cell activation using technologies such as mRNA, lentiviral vectors and antibodies, including camelid single domain antibodies. She was laureate of the Fund for Biotechnology award in 2005, received the Dr. Karel-Lodewijk Verleysen award of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine in 2011, the Melanoma Research Alliance young investigator award in 2017 and the BCLAS award in honor of Jean-René Maisin in 2019. She is (co)promotor of 13 defended and 16 ongoing doctoral theses and author on >130 Q1 publications.

DOI: VpEDgoY2FCHQga8MnOPP_prepost_2

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.