David S. Hong, MD, on the SURPASS Clinical Trial and TCR T-cell Therapy in Solid Tumors
Hong presented data from the SURPASS clinical trial at the 2022 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress.
“I’m excited about cellular therapy in general in solid tumors... I am really optimistic because I do think that, like in hematologic malignancies, such as lymphoma, it's just a matter of time before we kind of tweaked the technology to have higher efficacy and longer efficacy in these patients who after standard chemo really have no other options.”
Patients with metastatic ovarian, urothelial, gastroesophageal, and head and neck cancers remain without many options when early lines of treatment are not successful. T-cell receptor (TCR) engineered T-cell therapy is being explored as a potential option to address this unmet medical need.
David S. Hong, MD, professor and deputy chair, department of investigational cancer therapeutics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, The University of Texas, recently presented data from the phase 1 SURPASS clinical trial (NCT04044859), which is investigating ADP-A2M4CD8, a CD8+ TCR T-cell therapy, at the 2022 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress, September 9-13, in Paris, France.
In an interview with CGTLive, Hong explained how ADP-A2M4CD8 functions and gave an overview of the study’s findings so far. He also discussed the limitations of the trial and potential avenues for future research. In particular, he mentioned future plans to investigate the therapy in combination with checkpoint inhibitors, and additionally pointed out the need to further investigate means of identifying which patients can benefit from TCR T-cell therapy. He also expressed optimism about the future of cell therapy for the treatment of solid tumors in general.
