IMMUNOLOGY2025™ Conference Recordings-Immune engineering in cancer

Video Transcription

Video Summary

In this talk, Ingen Stromnes gave a broad overview of immune cell engineering for cancer therapy, with some updates on autoimmune disease. She compared T cell receptor (TCR) therapies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapies, explaining their strengths, limits, and clinical uses. CAR T cells have transformed blood cancer treatment, especially for CD19 and BCMA targets, but they can cause serious toxicities such as cytokine release syndrome and neurotoxicity. TCR therapies can target intracellular tumor antigens, including shared and tumor-specific neoantigens, but they face challenges like HLA restriction, low antigen abundance, and off-target toxicity.<br /><br />She highlighted exciting work on public neoantigens such as KRAS mutations, as well as efforts to improve receptor design, gene delivery, and cell sourcing. She also discussed new engineering strategies, including CRISPR-based editing, safety switches, NK-cell CARs, and cytokine “armoring” to improve T cell persistence and function.<br /><br />A major theme was that engineering alone is not enough: success depends on the tumor microenvironment, antigen presentation, and good preclinical models that better predict human outcomes. Stromnes concluded that future progress will likely require combinations of approaches and a stronger focus on tumor-specific antigens to improve efficacy while reducing toxicity.

Keywords

immune cell engineering

cancer therapy

T cell receptor (TCR)

CAR T cells

neoantigens

CRISPR-based editing

tumor microenvironment