Third cell’s the charm

Tactiva Therapeutics LLC is aiming to prolong the activity of TCR-based therapies by adding a third cell type that will act as a renewable source of the CD4+ cells necessary to sustain killer T cell production.

In other approaches, a patient’s CD4+ and CD8+ T cells are collected and engineered ex vivo to express a tumor-targeting T cell receptor (TCR). The CD8+ T cells are the primary killers of tumor cells, while CD4+ T cells promote survival and differentiation of CD8+ T cells into memory T cells...