Samuel Hume: New ideas for cancer-targeting engineered T cells the CD47 receptor

Samuel Hume, Researcher at the University of Oxford, recently shared on X:

“The new ideas for cancer-targeting engineered T cells are always so interesting

This one hinges on the fact that cancer cells and T cells both use the same mechanism to stop themselves getting cleared by macrophages: the CD47 receptor

So if you block CD47 (with CD47 antibodies), tumour cells are killed by macrophages, but so are T cells

This group tried to solve this by engineering T cells with a variant CD47, which still sends the don’t-eat-me signal to macrophages, but is resistant to CD47 antibodies

This means that you can treat with CD47 antibodies, clear cancer cells, and spare the engineered T cells

This is what that this looks like – B6H12 (the CD47 antibody) depletes wildtype, but not engineered (47E NY-ESO-1) T cells:

And in a mouse model of melanoma, CD47 antibodies reduce tumour growth, as do the engineered T cells – but combining them completely shrank tumours for the course of the experiment”

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Source: Samuel Hume/X