Adoptive Cell Therapy

The immunology research group in Adoptive Cell Therapy at Cima, integrated in the Cancer Center Clínica Universidad de Navarra, focuses on the study of T lymphocytes and the development of T-cell therapy strategies for cancer treatment.

T-cell therapy is a new type of advanced and personalized medicine that uses the patient's own lymphocytes to fight tumors. In these approaches, T cells are isolated from patients, given new competencies while expanded to large numbers, and, finally, they are infused back into the patient. This type of therapy has achieved important results in hematological tumors and some solid tumors, such as melanoma, but more effective strategies need to be developed to extend this therapy to more types of cancer.

Cell therapy approaches include:

• Tumor-infiltrating T lymphocytes (TILs), which possess a natural receptor, known as TCR, that allows them to recognize tumors.
• T cells genetically modified to express a tumor-specific transgenic receptor. Depending on the type of transgenic receptor we can distinguish between: TCR-T cell therapies (modified to express a tumor-specific TCR), and CAR-T cell therapies (expressing a chimeric receptor, known as CAR, capable of recognizing a tumor antigen).

Our research is focused on improving the efficacy of T-cell therapy for the treatment of solid tumors, with special attention to the development of TCR therapies, given the abundance of tumor antigens that can only be recognized by these receptors.