Camille Chatelain Awarded a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship

The researcher Camille Chatelain from Pereira Lab was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship. MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships aim to provide researchers with the tools to develop their own projects and advance their careers, while promoting excellence and innovation as prime values. Showcasing a valuable contribution to the field of immunotherapy, Camille Chatelain’s ExpandTILs was one of the selected 1696 projects among 10,360 applications.

Adoptive cell therapy (ACT) with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) is an immunotherapeutic strategy based on expanding “bulk” TILs from resected tumor tissue to reinject into patients. However, since tumor-reactive T cells are present in low numbers in tumors, TIL therapies lack strategies to specifically expand this T cell subset.  With the goal of extending the use of ACT for untreatable cancers, the selected project proposes to create tumor-reactive T cells for personalized, targeted, and effective tumor killing. The Pereira Lab’s strategy of reprogramming tumor cells into antigen-presenting dendritic cells will be harnessed to selectively expand tumor-reactive T cells. ExpandTILs has three specific aims: establish an optimized co-culture protocol with reprogrammed cancer cells to expand antigen-specific T cells; compare the antitumor efficacy of tumor-reactive and standardly expanded TILs in patient cancer spheroids, xenografts, and syngeneic mouse models; and profile the clonality and function of expanded patient-derived TILs.

Camille’s project integrates the fields of cellular reprogramming, cancer immunology, and immunotherapy to develop a first-in-class platform for the expansion of tumor-reactive TILs. Beyond the therapeutic promise for cancer immunotherapy, this project will significantly advance our understanding of tumor-specific T cell responses.