Protein engineered molecules for immune evasion

Cell therapies are becoming a very popular method to treat cancers and other diseases like Type 1 Diabetes. The procedure involves introducing an engineered cell into the patient to target cancer cells for elimination or to produce insulin in the above examples. The major issue holding back widescale cell therapy development is the host’s own immune system. The major function of the immune system is to detect and destroy foreign cells and pathogens in the body.

Currently all cell therapies need to be derived from the patient’s own cells to avoid being destroy by the immune system. For current cell therapies, the patient’s own cells need to be collected, expanded, engineered and differentiated under strict aseptic conditions before they can be re-introduced into the patient to for the treatment to begin to work.

This process takes 3-6 months, leading to a long lag time between diagnosis and the beginning of treatment, and is prohibitively expensive to most of the population. If these cell therapies could use an off-the-shelf or one-size-fits-all cell system, then both the lag time and the cost associated with current cell therapies would be dramatically reduce. Therefore we need to develop molecules to aid cell therapies to evade the immune system. This project will involve the engineering of immune cell binding proteins, protein production and purification of immune cell surface receptors and engineered proteins, biophysical characterisation and immune cell killing assays. The project is suited to students who are interested in protein structure and function, the immune system and enjoy wet lab work.