BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

Sleuthing for toxicity

August 29, 2013 7:00 AM UTC

Immunocore Ltd., Adaptimmune Ltd. and University of Pennsylvania researchers have determined that off-target toxicity most likely caused the two fatalities in a cancer trial of affinity-enhanced T cell receptors.1 The results highlight the need in the cancer immunotherapy space for harnessing biologically appropriate cellular testing and deep molecular analysis approaches to minimize cross-reactivity-related toxicity in future adoptive immunotherapy trials.

A primary challenge in engineering T cells for adoptive immunotherapy is selecting a cancer-associated antigen that is absent on healthy tissues and lacks homology to other self-proteins...