BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

Fate licenses rejection-resistant T cell therapies; plus a marker for anti-PD-1 treatment responsiveness, a cell proliferation control switch and more

BioCentury’s roundup of preclinical news

July 18, 2020 1:06 AM UTC

Baylor’s engineered T cells designed to avoid immune rejection
Baylor College of Medicine has granted Fate Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ:FATE) an exclusive license to alloimmune defense receptors, which render allogeneic cell therapies resistant to host immune rejection by selectively eliminating alloreactive T and NK cells. A Baylor team reported in Nature Biotechnology that anti-CD19 CAR T cells expressing an alloimmune defense receptor showed increased expansion and persistence and sustained tumor eradication and survival benefit in xenograft mouse models of leukemia and neuroblastoma versus conventional CD19-targeting CAR T cells. Financial terms of the deal are undisclosed.

Non-cleavable LAG3 resistant to PD-1 checkpoint blockade
A paper in Science Immunology suggests LAG3 expression could be a marker for responsiveness to anti-PD-1 treatment. University of Pittsburgh researchers and colleagues found that mice expressing a non-cleavable ADAM10-resistant form of LAG3 failed to mount an antitumor response when treated with a PD-1 inhibitor, and that skin cancer patients with a lower LAG3:ADAM10 ratio responded better to anti-PD-1/CTLA-4 immunotherapy...