The latest from the Maciocia Lab
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.