Member Info for crumbs

new TCR therapeutics... blimey....

Appointments add significant expertise to further advance Scancell's pipeline of cancer immunotherapies



Scancell Holdings plc, the developer of novel immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, today announces the appointment of Dr Samantha Paston as Head of Research and Dr Adrian Parry as Head of Manufacturing. Dr Paston started in her role in mid-January and Dr Parry will start in his role on 01 February 2019.



Dr Samantha Paston joins Scancell from Immunocore where she has held several positions since June 2008 including Head of T Cell Cloning and Group Leader. While at Immunocore Samantha was responsible for the generation of the in house T cell cloning method and biological molecule discovery which made significant contributions to the current Immunocore oncology pipeline. Prior to this, Samantha held a number of positions at Medigene, Avidex, NIBSC and GSK. Samantha holds a PhD from University College London in Immunology/Haematology, following an BSc Honours Degree in Microbiology from the University of Sheffield. Based at the Company's corporate offices in Oxford, Samantha will report directly to Scancell's founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Professor Lindy Durrant who commented: "Samantha will be invaluable in immunological design of the upcoming trials and spearheading the new TCR therapeutics and I am very excited to add such an experienced scientist to the team."

Mellman, Sahin, Lindy and Klausner... think you can find common threads of where they have all come from and the kinds of companies they got involved in..... 8p a share peeps :)

Well now to quote scancell :)... I'll capitalise the bit to go wow at:

'post-translational changes are
the result of the stresses to which cancer cells are
often subjected. A case in point is stress-induced
autophagy leading to the post-translational conversion of arginine to citrulline by peptidylarginine deiminase (PAD) enzymes. These modified
epitopes are presented on MHC-II and stimulate
CD4 T-cell responses.20 To this end, we have
demonstrated that stress-induced citrullinated
peptide epitopes induce potent, cytotoxic CD4
T-cell-mediated, antitumour responses that could
constitute a completely new class of cancer
treatment.

Nutrient and oxygen deprivation, endoplasmic
reticulum (ER) stress, as well as accumulated
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) damage by rapidly
dividing cancer cells creates a ‘stressed’ environment. The ability of established tumours to grow
and survive depends largely on autophagic flux.
However, the majority of tumours do not express
MHC-II, as the immunosuppressive tumour
environment inhibits inflammation. Vaccinating
with citrullinated peptides induces pro-inflammatory, CD4 Th1 cells that are initially reactivated
within the tumour environment by APCs, constitutively expressing MHC-II and autophagy.
These reactivated CD4 T cells release IFN?,
which upregulates class MHC-II on the tumours,
allowing direct recognition by the cytotoxic CD4
T cells. We have shown that citrullinated peptides
stimulate CD4 T cells, which do not require CD8
responses for antitumour immunity,21,22 and leave
a memory response to prevent recurrence.
Although our first vaccine targets are vimentin
and enolase which are expressed by many cancers, other commonly expressed cytoskeletal, glycolytic, regulatory and chaperone proteins are
also citrullinated under conditions of cellular
stress.23–25 In theory, combinations of a select few
citrullinated peptides could be used to target ALL
MAJOR SOLID CANCERS resulting in a step change in
the approach to treating tumours. In addition to
citrullination, other stress-induced post-translational modifications (siPTM) have been observed
within MHC-bound peptides.26,27 Our overarching hypothesis is that these vaccines based upon
siPTM of proteins will elicit new or boost preexisting immunity that will eliminate tumours
with a low T-cell infiltrate.'

Yes no doubt fruits of that will have already gone into the 30k funded project blueprint presentation...you see how already Lindy let Sahin in on modi2... well modi2 really would be the biggest beneficiary of winning GC... Lindy tweaking it to 100% then looking at it as our first moditope cocktail...modi1/2 becoming modi3... future keytruda plus x is it Merck? ot maybe it is what modi with what modi... plus ImmunoBodies and Glyco mabs... scancell a company with all the answers?

Funniest part.. we have to get the PD1ers and the Cell therapy-ers on board... but eventually we may not need either :p

We have always been told there has been a lot of interest in moditope since it was announced to the world... could be in for an interesting week.. and though scancell have been around years already... the story is really only just beginning ... but we could get to the juicy parts very fast now

Klausner....'The challenge is how do you find the right antigen....there really aren't any totally tumour specific antigens that I know of really erm but there's an extraordinary number of cell surface molecules that are presented at very low levels in any normal cell and at extremely high levels in many tumours and not surprisingly CAR T cells are exquisitely sensitive in terms of whether they act on a target cell or not of the density just like any other immune system and I think that is how we are going to figure how to get antigens against solid tumours'

Perlmutter....' I love the CAR-T data in hematological malignancies. People’s lives have been saved, so that’s great. But to make this work, you’re going to have to treat solid tumors. And if you’re going to do solid tumors, you have to find a tumor-specific antigen to wipe out. Guess what? People have been looking for tumor-specific antigens for the last 50 years. We don’t have any.

The second problem is the industrialization of the process. Right now, with autologous transplant—we remove a blood sample from you, engineer it to kill your tumor cells, and in 14 days return the sample to you—the chain-of-custody issue becomes a big deal. Anybody who’s practiced medicine knows how often blood transfusions are mismatched. I hate to bet against American engineers, or any engineers for that matter, but the full-scale throughput for CAR-T is very small.

Yes, I like him... An interesting thing to think about.... we are trying to seduce the likes of him and we are trying to seduce the likes of Perlmutter from Merck ... and they both have differing views on the future... yet what scancell have is what they both need :).....finding the right antigen!...the key to the future could well be in scancells hands and it might not be what do you need to add to keytruda or having to go through the whole cell therapy manufacturing process...

Here he is again as the GC build up.... errr builds up!....
With the word 'teams' being used for those to be funded and scancell being the only enterant to meet the vaccine challenge and off my head only one other team being an only one team to meet one of the 8 challenges I think ..... we stand a grand chance!.... Not to mention this guy is mister lets cure cancer via immunotherapy guy!
https://twitter.com/CRUKresearch/status/1086972162806824966

“[CRUK] is clearly a place that has the flexibility and the vision to change how it’s been doing business and to embrace and create something like the Grand Challenges” - Dr Rick Klausner, Chair of the #CRUKGrandChallenge Advisory Panel | meet the round 2 funded teams in 3 days

Watch from 23:00
And he does seem like project blueprint and moditope might be something he would be particularly interesting in... anyways we must not preempt :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma-8Qs-t7ZQ

Yeah, we did a few posts about him... what an impressive guy! Can't wait for him to join this BB

Celgene, following BMS buyout, forms two immuno-oncology partnerships

https://medcitynews.com/2019/01/celgene-following-bms-buyout-forms-two-immuno-oncology-partnerships/

The quest in trying to get cell therapies to work in solid tumour targets comes with some impressive amounts of money attached...imagine having the key to making T cells see all cancer tumours ... how valuable that would be

Apparently so

I know ... could get done for ramping!

I believe they present a 5 year plan.... so we should get results 10 years before SCIB1 combo begins :)

Yes I'd expect that is going to be the biggest expense and of course the biggest potential validation of moditope....all very exciting fingers toes and everything else crossed

Don't forget a trial in up to 4 targets even if in small cohorts is not going to be cheap... but yeah a lot can be done with £20 million... here is a look how one of the previous winners is spending theirs.. quite impressive
https://www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/business/prof-greg-hannon-on-taking-over-at-the-cancer-research-uk-cambridge-institute-and-creating-the-world-s-first-virtual-reality-tumour-9051688/

Did you read the one comment on that article .... interesting lol

First commercial action or big money coming in with no dilution is what will spur proper sp rerating and pi and ii interest ... BioNtech in TCR still looking the most likely there but you never know here with surprises ... GC would be fantastic on so many levels not least in pr/media exposure ...I do also think it would make us more commercially attractive especially to those already involved i.e BioNtech and Genentech ... at least GC is a talking point with an actual date attached because I can't tell you when anything else is happening.... the SCIB1 combo saga becoming something of a tragicomedy!