About This Project

T cells are fundamental to kill cancer cells. "Killer" T cells can do this directly, by recognizing tumor-specific mutated proteins on the surface of cancer cells. "Helper" T cells assist in the rejection of cancer by activating and guiding other immune cells to kill tumor cells. Inside the tumor, several immunosuppressive factors prevent T cells from functioning normally. We want to understand how to manipulate T cells to overcome this immunosuppression.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

This project is the first step of a larger effort to understand how to manipulate T cells to become resistant to immunosuppression. Ultimately, we want to be able to isolate cells, modify and expand them in vitro for a certain amount of time, and then inject them back into mice with tumors. If our manipulation of the T cells is sucessful, the modified T cells should be able to fight tumors better than what they normally would.

What is the significance of this project?

In vitro manipulation of T cells and expansion is difficult because the conditions to expand the cells are not well established. T cells are remarkably plastic and there is always a fine balance between expansion, survival, and function. With this funding proposal, we want to establish the best conditions to expand T cells, so that we can use this protocol in future experiments aiming to generate tumor-killing T cells.

What are the goals of the project?

The goal is to understand for how long (days? weeks? months?) and how many times (10x, 100x, 1000x, 10000x?) we can expand T cells. We also want to understand what culture conditions (different cytokines, different culture media, different culture times, etc) allow us to expand T cells that remain functional, alive, and capable to produce cytokines necessary to promote an anti-tumor immune response.