Development of novel immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer

  • Research type

    Research Study

  • Full title

    Development of novel immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer based on T cell receptors (TCRs) isolated from human T cells

  • IRAS ID

    319617

  • Contact name

    Sophie Papa

  • Contact email

    sophie.papa@enarabio.com

  • Sponsor organisation

    Enara Bio Limited

  • Duration of Study in the UK

    4 years, 11 months, 31 days

  • Research summary

    Enara Bio is developing new therapies for the treatment of patients with cancers of unmet need. Our therapies re-train a patient’s own immune cells, specifically cells called “T cells” found in everyone’s blood, to fight cancer.

    There are two main purposes of this research:
    1. To discover immune cells with new anti-cancer properties that may be able to be further developed into effective treatments for cancer patients.
    2. Development of new T cell therapies for cancer, we need to do everything we can to be confident that the therapies will be safe when we use them to treat people. This is not always a very straightforward thing to do in the laboratory. One key step is to use healthy donor blood cells, put them into experiments with T cell therapies that we are developing, and test to see whether we see any unwanted or excessive responses from the cells. This helps us to understand if the T cell therapy we are developing will be likely to be unacceptably reactive before we put any cancer patients through the risk of receiving the T cells as treatment.
    In addition to these primary purposes, we may also use other cells found in the blood to improve the design of the experiments we do at Enara to make safe and effective T cell treatments.

  • REC name

    London - Bromley Research Ethics Committee

  • REC reference

    22/PR/1176

  • Date of REC Opinion

    16 Sep 2022

  • REC opinion

    Further Information Favourable Opinion