Arianna Draghi, Postdoc Fellow at CCIT-DK, National Center for Cancer Immune Therapy (Denmark), shared a post on LinkedIn:
“How many tumor-reactive T cells are we missing?
In the TIL group at CCIT-DK – National Center for Cancer Immune Therapy of Denmark, we have been working on this question for a while.
Adoptive cell therapy has shown what TILs can do, but identifying which T cells are truly tumor-reactive is still a major bottleneck, especially beyond melanoma.
In our new abstract/poster displayed at ESMO Immuno2025, we presented the TR-TIL Platform: an antigen-agnostic, pan-cancer approach to identify polyclonal tumor-reactive CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ TILs for TCR discovery.
Key highlights
- Captures transcriptional programs induced by tumor recognition
- Identifies distinct CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ tumor-reactive TIL states
- High functional validation rates across multiple tumor types
- Identified tumor-reactive TCRs were detectable longitudinally in peripheral blood of long-term responders to TIL therapy
Overall, by removing the need for prior antigen knowledge, this framework can support TCR discovery, guide TIL enrichment strategies, and may help inform next-generation adoptive TIL/TCR-T approaches, including in poorly immunogenic tumors.
Access the abstract/poster here.
Co–first authoring this with Christopher Chamberlain was a great team job and a big thank you to all co-authors for the work behind this project, especially to Anne Weiß for presenting the poster.
We’re also grateful to our funding agencies for supporting this work.”
Marco Donia, Professor at University of Copenhagen, shared this post, adding:
“Poster download here.
Brilliant works by Arianna Draghi, Christopher Chamberlain, Anne Weiß and many others from the TIL group at CCIT-DK – National Center for Cancer Immune Therapy of Denmark.”
More posts about ESMOImmuno2025.