Human T cells with a defined T cell recognition specificity
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Suppression of the function of human anti-tumour T cells with a defined T cell receptor by human tumour spheroids
IRAS ID
289159
Contact name
Christoph Wuelfing
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Bristol
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 11 months, 30 days
Research summary
The immune system is the part of our body that fights off infections. It also plays a major role in cancer. T lymphocytes or T cells are white blood cells that play a major role in the immune system. One subset of T cells, cytotoxic T cells (CTLs), have the ability to kill cancer cells. However, this ability is often impaired when CTLs enter a tumour. The academic and industrial scientific communities aim to understand how tumours suppress the ability of CTLs to kill cancer cells with the intention to develop therapies to overcome such suppression, such that the CLTs start killing cancer cells to eradicate tumours. This is a large-scale effort. 655 academic and industrial organisations pursue 3,394 agents to enhance anti-tumour immune function. Experimental systems that allow for the rapid and effective evaluation of such agents are of substantial value in basic and therapeutically applied science. Based on extensive prior work in animal systems, we propose to build such system using human blood cells. We will grow cytotoxic T cells from human blood cells, engineer them to ensure that they can effectively recognise a human model tumour and then study their interaction with human tumour cells grown in the test tube as three dimensional structures. This experimental system successfully models key aspects of the function of CTLs within an actual tumour and can, therefore, be used to effectively understand how tumours suppress CTL function and which agents can overcome this suppression.
REC name
London - Riverside Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/PR/0763
Date of REC Opinion
26 Nov 2020
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion