CBE Colloquia - Revitalizing Exhausted T Cells with IL-10: A Journey from Lab Discovery to Clinical Application for Enhanced Cancer Immunotherapy
Our immune system interacts with many diseases in a multidimensional manner involving substantial biological, chemical, and physical exchanges. Manipulating the disease-immunity interactions may afford novel immunotherapies to better treat diseases such as cancer. My lab aims to develop novel strategies to engineer the multidimensional immunity-disease interactions (or termed ‘immunoengineering’) to create safe and effective therapies against cancer. We leverage the power of metabolic and cellular bioengineering, synthetic chemistry and material engineering, and mechanical engineering to achieve controllable modulation of immune responses. In this talk, I will share our recent discovery of IL-10 as a metabolic reprogramming agent that reinvigorates the terminally exhausted CD8+ tumor infiltrating lymphocytes. This strategy has been extended to develop metabolically armored CAR-T cells with IL-10 secretion to counter exhaustion-associated dysfunction in the tumor microenvironment for enhanced anticancer immunity. This new CAR-T cell therapy, i.e. IL-10-secreting CAR-T, has shown promise in several on-going IIT clinical trials (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT05715606, NCT05747157, NCT06120166) in the treatment of refractory/relapsed CD19+ B cell leukemia and lymphoma.
Li Tang received his B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University, China, in 2007, and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2012, under the supervision of Prof. Jianjun Cheng. He was an CRI Irvington Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Darrell Irvine at Massachusetts Institute of Technology during 2013-2016. He joined the faculty of Institute of Bioengineering, and Institute of Materials Science & Engineering, at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in 2016, and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022. His research focuses on developing multidimensional immunoengineering approaches for enhanced cancer immunotherapies. Dr. Tang is the recipient of Cancer Research Institute CLIP Award (2021), Anna Fuller Award (2021 and 2022), and named in the MIT Technology Review’s "Top 35 Innovators under Age 35" list of China region (2020), Materials Horizons Emerging Investigator (2020), Biomaterials Science Emerging Investigator (2019), and the recipient of European Research Council (ERC) starting grant (2018), and Nano Research Young Innovator Award (NR 45 under 45) (2018).