On Demand Webinar: Overcoming T Cell Therapy Barriers with Engineered Proteins
The tumor microenvironment can severely diminish adoptive T cell therapy efficacy by expressing ligands that activate T cell inhibitory receptors and by downregulating costimulatory ligand expression. To address these issues, we developed fusion proteins (FPs) that combine the ectodomain of one receptor with a different intracellular costimulatory signaling domain.
We evaluate engineering strategies in in vitro assays, including the Incucyte® serial killing over-time (SKO) assay, and in vivo persistence and survival studies. By pairing different extracellular and intracellular domains, we have developed a toolbox of FPs that confer different attributes to T cells.
The webinar includes details of:
- Assays to assess T cell function
- Engineering strategies to enhance T cell therapeutic efficacy
- Inhibitory obstacles in the tumor microenvironment
Speaker
Shannon K. Oda, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator at Seattle Children’s Research Institute (Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research) and Assistant Professor at University of Washington School of Medicine (Department of Pediatrics, Division of Hematology/Oncology)
Dr. Shannon Oda received a Ph.D. in Immunology under the mentorship of Dr. Raul Torres at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, where she discovered an immune-inhibitory role for a cancer-associated lysophospholipid. Dr. Oda completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Philip Greenberg at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, authoring multiple papers. She has received several awards, including the Future of Science and the LLS Career Development Program Special Fellow Awards, and has been invited to give talks internationally.
Dr. Oda was recruited to the Seattle Children’s Research Institute in 2020, where she is an Assistant Professor at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research and the University of Washington School of Medicine. Her research focuses on improving T cell immunotherapy, which uses immune cells to target and destroy cancer cells. Dr. Oda and her team have identified several obstacles that inhibit immune cells from effectively eradicating tumor and they are innovating new ways to engineer T cells to overcome these obstacles and improve immunotherapy of hematological and solid tumors.
