Personalized cellular immunotherapy focusing on patients with cervical or ovarian cancer

Every year around 1200 females are diagnosed with either ovarian or cervical cancer in Sweden. When relapse occur, the response rate to the second line of therapy is very low and no cell-therapies are available.

I have extensive knowledge regarding ACT, both form our clinical trial MAT02 focusing on tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) to treat melanoma patients as well as generation of tumor specific T cell from the blood using in silico predicted neoantigens loaded on dendritic cells (DC).

Based on this knowledge, we will further develop a TIL expansion protocol to improve the efficacy of TIL, to increase autologous TIL-Tumor recognition and investigate if it is possible to generate an ACT product from blood using neoantigen loaded DC from these patients.

Furthermore, we will use a novel method using an FDA approved drug to preserve the antitumor capacity of the cytotoxic cells used for ATC during oxidative stress. Combining this novel finding with our clinical protocols will further improve the ACT product.

Lastly, for melanoma, we have observed that TIL-Tumor recognition can be influenced by if tumor cells are grown in 2D vs 3D models due to immunoproteasome upregulation.

Therefore, we will analyses the efficacy of the new cell products using 3D models to investigate if similar results can be observed when analyzing cells form gynecological tumors. When we succeed, we have the opportunity to treat patients with personalized cell-based therapy.