Lung, Oesophageal, Gastric, Liver, Colorectal and Blood Cancers
Cancer Immunology
Team/Members of the group:
Close Collaborators:
Main Funders:
Irish Blood Transfusion Service
Active research programmes:
The Cellular Immunology group at TTMI is focussed on the roles and treatment potential of innate T lymphocytes for cancer. Cellular therapies involving two subsets of innate T cells - natural killer T (NKT) cells and gamma/delta (γδ) T cells are under intensive investigation in clinical trials, while another class of innate T cells - mucosa-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells – are showing anti-tumour efficacy in preclinical studies. Innate T cells are promising candidates for tumour immunotherapy because they are not MHC-restricted and therefore will not cause allogeneic tissue rejection, meaning that the cells from one donor can be used as an ‘off-the-shelf’ therapy for multiple patients. Furthermore, innate T cells can be engineered to express chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), thus combining their anti-tumour activities with the tumour targeting capacities of CAR-T cells.
In collaboration with clinicians, scientists and industry partners, we are investigating the biology of NKT cells, γδ T cell subsets, and MAIT cells in healthy donors and patients with lung, oesophageal, gastric, liver, colorectal and blood cancers. We found that many innate T cell subsets are depleted in the cancer patients. We identified novel stimulatory ligands and conditions that promote their anti-tumour activities. We also have identified mechanisms by which innate T cells activate the anti-tumour activities of other immune cells and how they can be grown under good manufacturing practice (GLP) conditions for clinical use.
Our expertise covers a range of cellular immunological techniques involved in the isolation, expansion and functional characterisation of human innate T cells and the optimisation of their anti-tumour activities. We propose to answer the following key questions:
How can we best we translate these finding into clinical trials at St James’s Hospital?