Epigenetic mechanisms may hold the key to breakthroughs in cell therapy. In October, we met to explore this exciting emerging field.
We opened the event with the talk by Ran Jing, Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School. Ran walked us through his exciting work on the role of epigenetic regulation in T cell differentiation. In particular, he demonstrated how epigenetic reprogramming through Ezh1 repression, facilitates successful iPSC-to-CAR-T differentiation, giving rise to a novel methodology that may soon find application in cell therapy industry.
To learn more about Ran’s work, you may read his recent publication here: EZH1 repression generates mature iPSC-derived CAR T cells with enhanced antitumor activity.
We continued the event with the presentation by Ansuman Sathpathy, Assistant Professor of Pathology at Stanford University, as well as co-founder of companies such as immunai or Cartography Biosciences. Ansuman helped us explore the landscape of epigenetic regulators that control T cell phenotype, and in particular T cell exhaustion.
T cell exhaustion has been one of major challenges in the field of cell therapy, especially for novel cell therapies aimed at solid tumors, where the intricate interplay of cells and extracellular factors in the tumor microenvironment (TME) is expected to strongly affect the infiltrating therapeutic cells and their function. Identifying epigenetic mechanisms that help prevent T cell exhaustion may help us find new ways of improving their therapeutic function.
To view Professor Ansuman Sathpathy’s talk, please visit our YouTube site:
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