The latest from the Maciocia Lab
Malika Hoekx and Jongwon Yoon will both be presenting posters at the 68th ASH Annual Meeting in New Orleans, 12–15 December 2026. Malika will present her work on protein-based approaches to off-the-shelf allogeneic CAR-T cells, and Jongwon his CRISPR screening work on what keeps CAR-T cells persisting in hostile tumour environments.
The abstracts are under embargo for now. We will post them here once ASH releases them.
Camilla Bove is leaving the lab to start a PhD. She has been central to our FRACTALL trial work and to the studies on resistance to CAR-T killing, and we are very sorry to lose her. We wish her the best of luck with the PhD.
We are about to advertise for a research technician to take on the role. The post will go up on the UCL jobs site, and we will link it here as soon as it is live.
Congratulations to Nicola Maciocia, who has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship. The award will support her work developing CAR-T cell therapies for T cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, building on the anti-CD21 programme she led from target discovery through to preclinical proof of concept. Fantastic news, and thoroughly deserved.
We are thrilled to announce that Paul has been awarded a prestigious Cancer Research UK Advanced Clinician Scientist Fellowship, securing long-term funding to continue developing novel CAR-T cell therapies at UCL. This is a huge vote of confidence in the lab's work and will support several new posts over the coming years.
A major milestone for the lab: our FRACTALL clinical trial of anti-CCR9 CAR-T cells for T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia has treated its first patient at UCLH. This is the culmination of years of preclinical work and represents one of the first CAR-T trials anywhere in the world specifically designed for T-ALL.
Nicola Maciocia has secured funding from Blood Cancer UK and the John Moulton Foundation to take anti-CD21 CAR-T cells into a clinical trial for T-ALL. This follows the publication of the preclinical data in Science Translational Medicine, and brings a second lab-developed therapy from our group towards patients.
Jongwon has successfully been awarded his PhD, completing his thesis on the mechanisms governing CAR-T cell persistence in the tumour microenvironment. He continues in the lab as a postdoctoral researcher. Congratulations, Jongwon!
Katie has successfully defended her PhD thesis on T cell immortalisation and allogeneic CAR-T development, passing with minor corrections. She is staying on as a postdoctoral researcher with Paul and Marc Mansour to continue this exciting work.
We say a fond farewell to Eve Guild, who has left the lab to start a PhD at Queen Mary University of London. Eve was a fantastic research assistant on our T-ALL programme and we have no doubt she will be brilliant. Good luck, Eve!
Nice paper in Haematologica from Angela Hwang, a former clinical fellow with the UCLH CAR-T team now back in Australia, and Claire Roddie, reporting on CAR-T therapy for large B-cell lymphoma in people living with HIV.
The results of the LibraT1 phase 1/2 trial of TRBC1-directed CAR-T cells for peripheral T cell lymphoma have been published in Nature Medicine. This is the first clinical trial based on our lab's discovery of TRBC1 as a therapeutic target, and the results show real promise for patients with this difficult-to-treat cancer.
Nicola's paper describing the preclinical development of anti-CD21 CAR-T cells for T-ALL has been published in Science Translational Medicine. This work identifies CD21 as a new target for T-ALL and demonstrates potent anti-leukaemic activity in preclinical models.
Our comprehensive review asking whether cellular immunotherapy represents the best chance of cure for T-cell malignancies has been published in Blood Advances.