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FORNY20-FORNY2020

KVAL: Magic Bullets – Harnessing the power of T cell receptor loaded vesicles

Awarded: NOK 0.50 mill.

The immune system is the body's built-in defense. This is exceptionally good at detecting and eliminating enemies such as viruses, bacteria and cancer cells. When you develop cancer, it is often because there has been a long-term battle between the immune system and the cancer cells, where the cancer cells eventually manage to trick the immune system into not attacking them. In such cases, you often have many immune cells that recognize the cancer cells, but the problem is that the cancer cells express stop signals that normally have the function of preventing an excessive immune response and autoimmunity. With this project, we have established a method to take such immune cells out of the body of cancer patients and activate them in a system without stop signals, which means that they produce small, targeted packages with the ability to recognize the cancer cells. We will then fill these packages with chemotherapy before returning them to the patients. The packages will then be transported around the body with the blood stream until they discover the cancer cells. They will then bind to their surface and trick them into taking up the chemotherapy which then kills the cancer cells. The purpose of the project is therefore to establish a new way of delivering chemotherapy that utilizes the immune system's exceptional ability to recognize cancer cells.

The success of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) has established immunotherapy as the standard treatment for several cancer types. However, cancer is still the number one cause of death in Norway and new immunotherapies are needed to cure patients not responding to current treatment modalities. Furthermore, many of the patients who receive ICIs experience severe immune related adverse effects (irAEs) because of off-target effects caused by an excessively active immune system. TCR+ EVs are intrinsically on-target due to their specificity for pMHC. Early proof of concept demonstrate there is a potential to form a novel class of cancer immunotherapy capable of delivering drugs with extremely high precision without inducing irAEs. With a successful validation we have an envision establishing a company as the preferred commercialization strategy, but we will also assess the potential of licensing the technology to pharma- and biotech companies.

Funding scheme:

FORNY20-FORNY2020