Developing Controllable Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocyte Therapies

“Melanoma is a very attractive target for TIL treatment because there are historic data showing that even un-engineered TIL can be very effective in patients that have failed several lines of treatment initially... for these patients, of which there's several thousands in the US annually, there are no good treatment options available right now. It has been shown that you can extract lymphocytes from the tumors of those patients, treat them, and get quite good response rates in the range of 30 to 50% as well as complete responses. This is the patient population that we will offer in a clinical trial at MD Anderson.”

Obsidian Therapeutics is targeting oncologic indications such as multiple myeloma and non-small cell lung cancer with tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapies engineered with the use of their cytoDRIVE platform.

Obsidian presented advancements to their cytoDRIVE platform at the 2022 American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Annual Meeting, May 16-19, 2022, in Washington DC. These advancements should improve efficacy and reduce toxicity of TILs by allowing controllable timing and protein levels of the therapies.

CGTLive spoke with Jan terMeulen, MD, PhD, chief scientific officer, Obsidian Therapeutics, to learn more about the company’s focus on TILs. He discussed the advantages of the cytoDRIVE platform.

REFERENCE

Sethi D, Li DJ, Davoodi S, et al. Armoring T-Cells with Regulatable, Membrane Tethered Cytokines Using Improved Drug-Responsive Domain Technology (cytoDRIVE™). Presented at: ASGCT 25th Annual Meeting, May 16-19, 2022. Abstract #1089