Cellectis publishes pre-clinical evidence MUC1 CAR T-cells reducing certain BC

Cellectis published a scientific article in Science Advances suggesting that TALEN -edited MUC1 CAR T-cells could be a potential treatment option for advance-stage triple negative breast cancer TNBC patients with limited therapeutic options. In this article, Cellectis described its multi-layered CAR T-cell engineering strategy using TALEN and synthetic biology to multi-armor CAR T-cells with synergistic functionalities to overcome the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment of solid tumors. With this strategy, Cellectis demonstrates enhanced cytotoxic activity of MUC1 CAR T-cells armored with PD1KO, tumor-specific IL12 release and TGFBR2KO attributes, all of them catered towards the TNBC TME, in intravenous and intratumoral mouse models. “Complexity of solid tumors decreases the efficacy of CAR T-cell therapies. With this pre-clinical study, we showed that TALEN(R)-mediated multiplex editing can support CAR T-cells in effectively mounting an anti-tumor response to clear breast tumors…Importantly, intratumoral treatment effectively reduced local and distant tumors of large size using low doses of multi-armored MUC1 CAR T-cells. This pre-clinical data suggests that the benefits of antigen recognition are maintained at distant sites and highlights the potential to address metastasis with local administration.