Dr. Christian Hinrichs, Co-Director of the Duncan and Nancy MacMillan Cancer Immunology and Metabolism Center of Excellence at Rutgers Cancer Institute and RWJBarnabas Health, shares key research and clinical insights from two HPV related studies that demonstrate the transformative potential of emerging T-cell therapies. In this video, Dr. Hinrichs explains how these novel immunotherapies may offer long lasting remission and complete tumor regression for patients with advanced epithelial cancers, highlighting the promise of targeted cellular treatments in the future of cancer care.
We've recently shared research from Rutgers Cancer Institute conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the National Cancer Institute on the treatment of metastatic HPV associated cancers with cell therapy. Cellular therapies have been really effective in hematologic cancers with CAR T therapies, which can be curative for patients. Developing these types of treatments for common cancers and epithelial cancers specifically has been much more challenging. We presented the findings from two studies. The first is a study of till therapy for HPV associated cancers. So this is a treatment where we operated. And removed a tumor from a patient with a metastatic HPV mediated cancer. What we found recently is that 10 years after that one time treatment, the patients remain without any evidence of cancer, which really provides hope that the patients may be cured. It's important as proof of principle because it shows that cellular therapy can mediate this kind of durable, complete response in an epithelial cancer. We recently found that with a new treatment that's being developed at Rutgers Cancer Institute, we can take the peripheral blood T cells from a patient and then we genetically engineer them in the laboratory to express a receptor that allows them to target. The abnormal viral E7 protein that's present in the cancer and the receptor that we give them is a receptor that we discovered in the lab that's particularly good at targeting this abnormal protein. It's different than other immunotherapies in that it doesn't just try to provoke the patient's existing immune system to target the cancer. But it actually engineers the patient's immune cells to have the best targeting of that abnormal protein, and in the ongoing phase 2 clinical trial we saw responses in 6 of 10 patients, including 2 complete responses that are each ongoing a year or more after a one-time treatment. If you're faced with metastatic cancer, you don't want treatments that are aimed at just slowing the cancer down or shrinking it transiently. What you want are treatments that make the cancer go away. What I'm doing in the lab, what my team is trying to accomplish is treatments that eliminate the cancer. So fundamentally, the things that we're developing are designed around the idea of a one-time treatment that lives in the body. And kills all of the cancer cells everywhere and then lets the patient go about their lives. We've actually been successful with that in some cases. A limitation in our research is the accrual of patients to clinical trials, so we really need referring physicians to send us patients to participate in these studies. In the laboratories at Rutgers Cancer Institute, we're working on next generation approaches that make the treatments more potent and work better and also expand them to more patients with the same types of cancers and to patients with other types of cancer.
