Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Cancer affects a substantial portion of the Canadian population; however, a universal cure remains elusive. Recent approaches to cancer treatment have focused on T cells, an important type of immune cell that helps to attack cancerous and virally infected cells. A novel treatment approach, termed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy, involves re-engineering T cells to recognize and target tumors. This is accomplished by equipping T cells with a special receptor called a CAR, which allows the T cell to recognize cancer cells. While this approach has achieved remarkable success in treating blood cancers, current methods to create CAR-T cells rely on engineering a patient's own T cells every time. As a result, CAR-T therapy in its current form is extremely expensive, and therefore inaccessible to the general public. My work aims to develop a method to produce CAR-T cells from a renewable source. I will accomplish this by generating CAR-T cells from stem cells, or specialized cells that can become any cell type in the body. As stem cells, unlike T cells can regenerate themselves indefinitely, this approach provides a method to produce a continuous supply of CAR-T cells for therapy, bypassing the need to collect T cells from individual patients. Additionally, this production method will be compatible with mass manufacturing, transforming CAR-T therapy from an expensive, personalized process to readily-available pharmaceutical product. Collectively, these efforts will result in a novel and generalizable pipeline to produce CAR-T cells, rendering this highly effective therapy more accessible to Canadian cancer patients.