University of Florida
Gainesville, United States
Name: Linchun Jin, MD, PhD
Title: Assitant Scientist
Affiliation: University of Florida
Over the past 5 years, our group focused on CD70, a member of TNF ligand family, which is ectopically expressed by glioma. CD70 is shown to be an important mediator involved in multipronged tumor immunosuppression and glioma progression that can be potentially targeted by CAR T cells. Developing specific CAR against CD70 positive tumors may help offset the inhibition and reverse the tumor progression for patients with malignant gliomas. CD70 specific CAR T cells induced profound antitumor responses against human GBM and in immunocompetent models of aggressive murine gliomas. However, in clinical practice, inadequate T-cell migration and/or persistence in tumor microenvironment presents challenges for CAR T cell therapy in solid tumors. Thus, we developed a 2nd version of CD70 CAR T cells which is engineered to co-express chemokine receptor responsive to chemokine secreted by tumors. Multiple pre-clinical solid models were tested, and result show remarkable CAR T cell tumor trafficking and potent anti-tumor response. In addition, this application has been expanded to other deadly cancer models, e.g. ovarian cancer and pancreatic cancer. This work is published on Nature Communications, and the endeavors make the base of the very first CAR T cell clinical trial in University of Florida.