Week 10: Optimising the Development of Immunotherapy

This week we had a nice summary of immunotherapy by Dr Robert, of which included exciting class discussions that really got me thinking deeper. Much more research has to be done to better understand the immune system, especially because of the possible adverse events that may occur to each individual. At the same time, as much as I think that the idea of a universal CAR-T cell is ideal, I think that there is a chance the immune system may still consider the CAR-T cells as foreign and we are unsure of the effects of knocking out the endogenous T-cell receptor.

As for the future of immunotherapy, there is definitely a large market potential given that it could possibly the least immunogenic and more sustainable if it comes from the patient’s own immune cells. Unfortunately, I think that its application may be limited to single antigen associated diseases or tumour. We would require a better understanding of the available antigens on specific tumour to avoid any off-target effects and that’s where the biomarker libraries will play an important role.

Right now there is a huge gap in the patient information that we currently have about different kinds of diseases and cancers, so there has to be a continual effort to improve the database of real world data. I believe with a more comprehensive understanding of the disease population, we can more accurately carry out high throughput screenings to choose the right target antigens for our ideal CART cells! No wonder data solutions companies like IQVIA, are so important to clinical trials and therapeutics discovery today.