Beneficiary: Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association
Funding: GO-Bio Phase I (01.01.2019 bis 31.08.2022, 4.901.299 Euro)

Project Description

Immunotherapy currently holds the most potential for cancer treatment. Doctors use pharmaceuticals that stimulate the activities of the patient's immune system to encourage it to fight cancer cells in the body. T-cell therapy is one of several promising approaches. It involves extracting highly active immune cells – T cells – from a patient's blood and programming them with a synthetic molecule in the laboratory. Those synthetic molecules are tumour-specific receptors that enable the T-cells to detect tumour cells in a patient's body and fight them effectively. The tumour-specific receptors are added to the T-cells which are then infused back into the patient. They circulate through the body, multiply and start to attack cancer cells. One example of this approach are CAR-T cell therapies. They have already been approved in the USA, with the EU to follow suit shortly.

The "Captain T-cell" GO-Bio project, led by molecular biologist Felix Lorenz, does not use a CAR molecule as tumour-specific receptor, instead opting for a cluster of receptors called classical T-cell receptors (TCR). The team hopes to use these to develop a highly effective T-cell therapy for untreatable cancer patients. The start-up project team at the Max Delbrück Centre Berlin (MDC) is focusing on a number of solid tumours for which TCR T-cell treatment seems a promising approach. The first therapy will be developed for patients suffering from types of cancer related to the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV). Each year, around 95,000 patients in the USA, Europe and China die from these EBV-positive cancers. In order to treat cancer patients with TCR T-cells, a technology platform has been set up to develop and detect TCRs specifically designed for the target structures of tumours.

The “Captain T-cell” project aims to develop EBV-specific TCRs, conduct pre-clinical tests and prepare a therapeutic product suitable for testing in a clinical phase I/IIa study. MDC plans to out-license its expertise to the “Captain T-cell” project. The Berlin-based team aims to set up a company and to finance the first clinical trial from private capital. Going forward, it also aims to develop a TCR T-cell therapy that will achieve approval as an “orphan” drug in 2028. The “Captain T-cell” team also hopes to develop T-cell immunotherapies for other tumour-related illnesses in the future.