Name: Sven Weller
Project Title: Developing a novel method using nanoparticles to expand cancer-specific T-cells in vitro
Group: Colloids & Biological Interfaces
Supervisor(s): Thomas L. Andresen, Lars Ringgaard Petersen and Gael Clergeaud Veiga
Project Description:
Adoptive Immunotherapy showed promising results in treating cancer in the past decades, especially when common therapies failed. Anyhow, T‐cell therapies require maturation and expansion of cancer‐specific T‐cells, which usually come at extremely low frequency. The current methods to activate and expand T‐cells have several drawbacks. A continuous exposure to a certain antigen can led to exhaustion of the T‐cells. Classic expansion protocols with dendritic cells require multiple passaging steps, a complex combination of cytokines and long cell expansion times. In this project, a novel method using nanoparticles as synthetic 'antigen presenting cells' will be developed to optimize and enrich cancer‐specific T‐cells. The nanoparticles (NP) will be formulated to function as engineered antigen presenting particles with optimal co‐stimulatory molecules for the T‐cells.
Perspective:
Artificial antigen presenting cells have the potential to simplify immunotherapies. Using a Nano-sized system provides the option to fine tune cell-particle interaction and with that increase the expansion numbers.