The European Innovation Council (EIC) awards the project Repro-TIL with an EIC Transition grant

The project Repro-TIL – “Breakthrough Neoantigen-specific Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocyte Therapies Through Novel Dendritic Cell Reprogramming” – secures a Transition grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC). Coordinated by Asgard Therapeutics, this project joins the expertise of the Pereira Lab and Dr. Inge Marie Svane’s group at Herlev Hospital (Denmark).

Despite proving transformative for cancer treatment, current immunotherapy strategies render a significant portion of cancer patients without an effective solution, particularly those with less immunogenic tumors. Adoptive cell therapy (ACT) with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) has shown great promise for cancer treatment and has recently been approved for melanoma. Yet, conventional TIL therapies are based on the unselective expansion of TILs from resected tumors and subsequent reinfusion into patients; these strategies do not account for T cell variability and often expand bystander rather than reactive TILs. Advancing TIL therapies for cancer treatment warrants the development of strategies capable of expanding tumor-reactive TILs to promote effective tumor killing.

REPRO-TIL’s goal is to extend the clinical application of dendritic cell reprogramming for adoptive T cell transfer, implementing this technology in existing clinical protocols for cell therapy with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes. The aim is to incorporate a single step in the procedure of state-of-the-art tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes expansion protocols: transduction of tumor pieces with a vector that elicit the reprograming of tumor cells to dendritic cells forcing antigen presentation and expansion of tumor-reactive T cells.

Through a combination of academic (Lund University), industrial (Asgard Therapeutics) and clinical partners (Inge Marie Svane at Herlev Hospital in Denmark), pre-clinical validation and regulatory approval-enabling studies for the clinical translation of this novel tumor-reactive tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes therapy will be performed.

The EIC Transition grant awards promising technologies that show potential to be further matured and validated towards innovative commercial applications. Overall, we will join efforts to introduce DC reprogramming into theexisting clinical-scale manufacturing process of TILs, assuring a superior TIL product compliant with clinical regulatory requirements. Ultimately, Repro-TIL will develop a clinical product development pipeline for DC reprogramming, placing our strategy at the vanguard of ACT.