Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TALE (Therapeutic Allele Engineering: A novel technology for cell therapy)
Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2023-11-30
Recent advances in genetics, cell biology and immunology research have translated into highly efficient cell-based therapeutics. The reprogramming of immune killer cells to recognise B cell leukaemias has brought unprecedented clinical responses in treatment-resistant cases. However, a fundamental problem of today’s cell therapies is that transferred and host cells cannot be distinguished in the course of the treatment. The EU-funded TALE project aims to introduce novel allele engineering technology to improve the safety and efficacy of human cell therapies. The objective is to develop a non-viral DNA-free safety switch and allele engineering solutions that are applicable to any surface protein. The project aims to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of this new approach to go beyond cancer therapies.
In the first half of the project we have made significant progress towards the proposed research goals. We rationally designed allele engineering solutions for multiple target proteins. We validated their protective effect and successfully engineered them into relevant primary cell types.
The results obtained so far are in line with the initially proposed objectives. They confirm the feasibility and utility of this newly developped approach. Furthermore, our results opened new avenues to further develop allele engineering for additional applications.