Next frontiers in cancer care: CAR treatments for solid tumors

It was a pleasure to welcome Professor?Antonia Mueller, head of the Department of Transfusion Medicine and Cell Therapy at the?Medical University of Vienna, to give the latest invIOs Innovation Talk on CAR cell therapies in liquid and solid cancers.??

Professor Mueller acknowledged the efficacy of anti-CD19 and anti-BCMA CAR-T cell therapies that have been approved for aggressive blood cancers and where long-term data has recently been published on sustained responses in some patients.?However,?CAR-T cell application to solid tumors is still limited due to the tumor microenvironment and scarcity of specifically targetable tumor antigens.?

All current products on the market, and most investigational CAR-T cell therapies, are autologous, using the patient's own peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) as starting material to manufacture a patient-specific batch. In this context, all stakeholders, the companies, hospitals and regulators should work hand-in-hand early on during the development of such individualized cell therapies.??

The next generation of engineered cell therapies beyond CAR-T cells may open up an entirely new path of highly individualized approaches for patients. This is an area of focus for invIOs, as we recently?announced a new joint project leveraging our EPiC cell therapy platform to investigate the potential of an innovative CAR-T cell therapy approach to treat aggressive lung tumors.

The invIOs Innovation Talks were launched this year as regular one-hour lunchtime sessions and are designed to give all members of staff an outstanding opportunity to learn from the insights of expert speakers through presentations and Q&A sessions.

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