New Therapy Trains Immune Cells to Find and Kill Cancer, Offering Hope Beyond Brain Tumors

What is the name of your invention?

D2C7 BiTE (bispecific T-cell engagers)

What's your discovery?

D2C7 BiTE redirects T cells to target and kill EGFR-expressing tumor cells while sparing EGFR-expressing healthy cells. This therapy can be used to treat any cancers characterized by amplification of EGFR including glioblastoma, non-small cell lung cancer, and breast cancer.

What motivated you to do this research?

Cell-based therapies for glioblastoma and other aggressive solid cancers are severely lacking and are hindered by the paucity of uniformly expressed target antigens. 

“We sought to develop a therapy that can effectively and safely treat a variety of cancers and a large number of patients.” - Peter E. Fecci, MD, PhD

What's the potential impact of your discovery?

Cancer continues to be a leading cause of death in the US and worldwide. Our therapy has the potential to treat a variety of cancers where current treatments have largely failed.

What near-term milestones are you most excited about?

We are excited to expand our preclinical efficacy studies into other cancer models beyond glioblastoma. These will include in vivo models of NSCLC and triple-negative breast cancer.

What future directions do you wish to expand this discovery?

Building on our preclinical efficacy studies, we hope to initiate IND-enabling studies that will facilitate the design and implementation of early phase clinical trials within the next few years.