Amalie Kai Bentzen
Dysfunctional neoepitope-specific T cells as targets for early Cancer Immunoprevention
Amalie Kai Bentzen, Health Tech at the Technical University of Copenhagen, has received a Lundbeck Foundation Postdoc grant worth DKK 2,800,000.
About the project
The immune system eliminates mutant cells that arise with age, but defects in this defense facilitate cancer development. The nature of these defects remains a mystery, presenting an acute scientific challenge.
This Lundbeck Foundation Postdoc will use preinvasive pulmonary neoplasia (PID) as a model to examine dysfunctional T cell responses during tumour formation, to define rational targets for early T cell reprogramming. Rescuing the early dysfunction of key antigen-specific T cells could halt early-stage malignancy or prevent cancer formation.
This work will generate novel targets and/or validate existing regulatory pathways to pioneer future clinical strategies in Early Intervention Immunotherapy. With this project Amalie Kai Bentzen and her colleagues seek to define which T cells to target in PID, and how. She will test whether lesion-infiltrating T cells recognise neoantigens and define, for the first time, the key inhibitory or stimulatory molecules to target on neoepitope specific T cells (Tneo) in PID. This will inform how to tune early immune responses to prevent or halt cancer formation. Conversely, this can contribute to understanding how autoimmune T cells resist becoming ’dysfunctional’. From a translational point of view immunotherapeutic strategies developed to target the dysfunctional T cell response (in cancer), can provide opportunities for inverse strategies to target the dysregulated T-cells that drive autoimmune diseases.
