Treating incurable cancers – Immune Effector Cell Therapies

Thanks to a generous donation in memory of Margaret Alison Melvin, the Foundation awarded a 2024 Seed Funding Grant to Dr Collin Chin.

With this funding, Dr Chin and his team will investigate how a patient’s immune cell fitness affects their response to cell therapies. Immune effector cell (IEC) therapies harness the power of the immune system to combat cancer cells and represent a new era in the battle against cancer.

IEC therapies include chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells whereby a patient’s immune cells are harvested from the blood, genetically engineered to recognise cancer cells, and reinfused into the bloodstream to kill cancers. IEC therapies such as CAR T-cell therapy have the potential to cure patients with otherwise fatal cancers.

While these new treatments show immense promise, they are very expensive, and more than half of patients relapse or do not respond. This project aims to predict which patients will benefit most from IEC therapies. This will help improve patient outcomes, reduce healthcare costs, and help researchers develop strategies to overcome resistance to IEC.

To achieve this the project will utilise spectral flow cytometry, a technology that analyses single blood cells using lasers, to characterise the T immune cells of blood cancer patients treated with IEC therapy. Using this technology, researchers will characterise the patterns of T cell exhaustion in these patients to identify patients who will benefit most from the therapy.