On November 7, 2022 Alaunos Therapeutics, Inc. ("Alaunos" or the "Company") (Nasdaq: TCRT), a clinical-stage oncology-focused cell therapy company reported a poster presentation highlighting the potential of the Company’s human neoantigen T-cell receptor platform (hunTR) to expand its TCR Library (Press release, Alaunos Therapeutics, NOV 7, 2022, View Source [SID1234623283]). The data will be presented at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) (Free SITC Whitepaper)’s (SITC) (Free SITC Whitepaper) 37th Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts from November 8-12, 2022.

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"We are excited to present data demonstrating the ability of our proprietary hunTR platform to rapidly identify and validate neoantigen-reactive TCRs," commented Drew Deniger, Ph.D., Vice President, Research & Development. "By leveraging hunTR, our aim is to efficiently expand our TCR-T Library Phase 1/2 program with new, proprietary TCRs. This will enable us to broaden the pool of eligible patients who could benefit from our non-viral TCR-T cell therapies. We look forward to expanding our application of hunTR for additional shared KRAS, TP53, and EGFR mutations and rapidly take novel TCR candidates from the lab through to clinical translation."

hunTR is a high-throughput screening process that uses state-of-the-art bioinformatics and next generation sequencing to interrogate and deconvolute thousands of single T cells simultaneously. In the study, Alaunos evaluated ~525,000 TCR+HLA+neoantigen combinations in nine patients across colorectal, endometrial and breast cancers. All patients screened had at least one detectable neoantigen-reactive TCR, including one shared KRAS-Q61H mutation and 21 personal mutations. Of these, 78% were restricted by HLA Class II while 22% were restricted by HLA Class I. A median reactive hit rate of 13% was achieved per patient with an average of three unique neoantigen specificities. In subsequent patients screened only for KRAS mutations, multiple patients had TCRs reactive to KRAS-G12V, further demonstrating the ability of hunTR to discover exclusively owned hotspot mutation-reactive TCRs that could be added to the clinical library. The Company plans to continue to expand the application of hunTR to screen for additional shared KRAS, TP53, and EGFR mutations to rapidly advance new TCR library candidates from the lab through to clinical translation. In addition, hunTR may be suitable for personalized TCR-T therapies, enabling mutation-targeted cell therapy for most solid tumor cancers.