On April 8, 2022 BlueSphere Bio, a T-cell receptor (TCR) T-cell therapy company developing a powerful TCR discovery platform and novel therapeutic candidates for patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors, reported that it presented preclinical data demonstrating the potential of its novel high throughput TCXpress platform to efficiently identify TCRs against minor histocompatibility antigens (miHAs) for the future clinical development of adoptive TCR T cell therapy aimed at improving the efficacy of allogeneic stem cell transplant (alloSCT) treatments for patients with hematologic malignancies, including acute myeloid leukemia (AML), during the 2022 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) (Free AACR Whitepaper) Annual Meeting on April 8 – 13, 2022 (Press release, BlueSphere Bio, APR 8, 2022, View Source [SID1234616064]).

Schedule your 30 min Free 1stOncology Demo!
Discover why more than 1,500 members use 1stOncology™ to excel in:

Early/Late Stage Pipeline Development - Target Scouting - Clinical Biomarkers - Indication Selection & Expansion - BD&L Contacts - Conference Reports - Combinatorial Drug Settings - Companion Diagnostics - Drug Repositioning - First-in-class Analysis - Competitive Analysis - Deals & Licensing

                  Schedule Your 30 min Free Demo!

This work enabled the discovery of BlueSphere’s first clinical candidate, a TCR T-cell therapy directed against the miHA HA-1. The company anticipates filing its first IND by the end of 2022. In addition, the TCXpress platform has enabled the discovery of a TCR panel reactive against other relevant miHAs, which BlueSphere plans to soon announce this year.

Mark Shlomchik, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder and chief scientific officer of BlueSphere Bio commented that "The data from this presentation highlight the potential of our platform technology for the development of novel cellular therapies targeting miHAs that can be used to improve treatment outcomes in alloSCT. These data also demonstrate the remarkable efficiency of our high throughput discovery platform to robustly identify TCRs with potential applications that are not limited to a single class of targets or therapeutic strategy. We look forward to continuing to advance our internally developed candidates and fully realizing the potential of this platform to transform TCR discovery."

Presentation Highlights

Title: High throughput single cell based cloning reveals functional diversity of T-cell receptors targeting minor histocompatibility antigen

Presenter: Sawa Ito, M.D., Ph.D., hematologist/oncologist at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and Assistant Professor, Division of Hematology Oncology and of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Data Highlights:

• TCXpress successfully identified a diverse set of novel TCRs with activity against the miHA, HA-1, from a single donor, naturally immunized to HA-1 through pregnancy.

• TCXpress yielded this set of TCRs with a broad functional affinity from a single donor, demonstrating its rapid and efficient discovery capabilities.

• When re-expressed in primary CD8-positive T cells, a high affinity TCR against HA-1 mediated specific killing of HA-1 positive target cells.

• The data also highlight the wide range of TCR affinities that can arise from a natural immune response against a single allopeptide/HLA complex, underscoring the potential to identify and characterize TCRs against other targets with this technology.

About TCXpress

TCXpress is a proprietary high-throughput and efficient T-cell receptor (TCR) capture, expression and functional screening platform capable of processing thousands of single T cells directly into functionally expressed TCRs within a matter of days, thereby creating extensive libraries without the need for lengthy sequencing.