Invited Speaker 35th Lorne Cancer Conference 2023

NK cells: next generation cell therapies for cancer (#26)

Katy Rezvani 1
  1. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TEXAS, United States

Dr. Rezvani will discuss a new frontier in NK cell therapeutics: engineering NK cells with chimeric antigen receptors.  She will discuss the opportunities and challenges of NK cell CAR engineering, and present pre-clinical and early phase clinical data on cord blood-derived NK cells expressing CD19 CAR and IL-15 to enhance their in vivo persistence in patients with relapsed or refractory blood cancers. In addition, she will discuss novel strategies for the gene editing of CAR NK cells to enhance their function by targeting immune checkpoints. Finally, she will discuss the approach of precomplexing NK cells with an anti-CD16 bispecific antibody targeting cancer targets to redirect their specificity, thus providing a rapid approach to translate NK cells with CAR-like characteristics to the clinic