Gene-engineered T cell
The TCR-T technology involves transformation of T cells for expression of the same T cell receptor (TCR). The T cells are amplified in vitro and then re-transfused to the patients. The TCR-T technology has multiple advantages: it makes in vitro amplification easier, may realize multi-target design on the same T cell, so as to target multiple epitopes, may improve functions of T cells through genetic modification, and may utilize allogeneic T cells for preparation, so as to make them become an off-the-shelf product. We performed cloning, sequencing, and affinity screening of TCR through TAA antigen (e.g. NY-ESO-1) T cell clone targeting broadly, and constructed a TCR-T vector pool covering more than 90% of Chinese population. This kind of TCR-T can be targeted at most tumor patients and belongs to a general TCR-T product. We developed a personalized TCR-T product targeted at neoantigen specific epitopes using the technical platform established during construction of general TCR-T, in combination with prediction and identification of neoantigen specific epitopes. This product can avoid the shortcoming of general TCR-T, with higher specificity and more selectable targets. At present, the bottleneck of personalized TCR-T product is that the construction and preparation are time consuming and costly. We are developing the second generation of personalized TCR-T product, which will greatly shorten the production time and reduce the cost of TCR-T and so make the product more valuable for clinical application.