TCR Search-and-Capture: Working Toward Personalized Cancer Therapy

"Relapse of the leukemia is the major cause of treatment failure and, once you relapse, almost all of those people—80 to 90%—will ultimately die...So, we're looking to improve on that by giving a more effective form of cell therapy." —Warren Shlomchik, MD, cofounder and scientific advisory board chairman at BlueSphere Bio

Cell and gene therapy is not immune to the personalized medicine trend, and BlueSphere Bio hopes its leading T-cell receptor engineering (TCR) platform, along with its TCX-101 clinical candidate, can ultimately bolster the armamentarium for patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors.

The company's TCXpress™ is being touted as more personalized than any other type of medicine that has ever been tried.

"It's the foundation of our ability to take any sample, any specimen, whether it's a tumor or a blood sample, and screen a repertoire of T-cell receptors rapidly. Literally, thousands in just days," David Apelian, MD, PhD, MBA, chief executive officer at BlueSphere Bio, told CGTL.

Apelian and Warren Shlomchik, MD, cofounder and scientific advisory board chairman at BlueSphere Bio, joined CGTL to discuss BlueSphere's technology and its leading clinical program, TCX-101, which targets minor histocompatibility antigens (miHAs) by engineering TCR T cells specific to a particular miHA.

BlueSphere recently presented preclinical data demonstrating the potential of TCXpress™ at the 2022 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting.

"The data from this presentation highlight the potential of our platform technology for the development of novel cellular therapies targeting miHAs that can be used to improve treatment outcomes in allogeneic stem cell transplant," Mark Shlomchik, MD, PhD, cofounder and chief scientific officer at BlueSphere Bio, said in a statement. "These data also demonstrate the remarkable efficiency of our high throughput discovery platform to robustly identify TCRs with potential applications that are not limited to a single class of targets or therapeutic strategy. We look forward to continuing to advance our internally developed candidates and fully realizing the potential of this platform to transform TCR discovery."