TScan Therapeutics Inc (TCRX)

[jondoeuk]

The company knows that targeting a single antigen isn't going to be sufficient to eliminate all cancer cells, as it allows any lacking it to escape. Also, targeting a single HLA allele, such as HLA-A*02, could result in loss through commonly observed loss of heterozygosity (HLA LOH) mechanisms. So they have developed a screening strategy to select patients and TCRs, which is designed to prevent resistance arising from either antigen loss and/or HLA LOH.

They will select two different TCRs that target intact antigens and HLA alleles, which should result in deeper and more durable responses over the current TCR-T cell therapies. Now they are designing trials to test this hypothesis clinically.

Long-term, the vision is to expand ImmunoBank, analyse the tumour for each patient to determine which antigens are expressed at high levels, and select up to three TCRs.

As for predicting responses to current SOC, the same team published a previous study, in which they developed machine learning that could predict responses to chemotherapy in patients with gastric or bladder cancer. A new study has shown that artificial intelligence using the interactions between genes in a biological network could successfully predict the patient response to not only chemotherapy, but also immunotherapy in multiple types https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31535-6