Engineering and Delivering B Cells Using Biomaterials against Breast Cancer

Introduction

Breast cancer (BC) is the most diagnosed cancer worldwide, and despite treatment availability, the disease remains challenging to treat, causing substantial adverse side effects and fatalities globally. The lack of efficacy and inaccessibility of standard care supports this demand for better treatments.

Current Challenges

This is demonstrated by resection surgery and current (neo)adjuvant therapies such as chemotherapy exhibiting inadequacies, resulting in 30% of BC patients having metastases. These percentages are even higher in low human development index regions due to:

• Inaccessibility
• Cost
• Growing populations

Emerging Solutions

Adoptive cell therapy (ACT), such as CAR-T, is a category of emerging immunotherapies expected to impact oncology by transferring engineered immune cells into a patient to eliminate cancer cells. However, these treatments are currently ineffective in BC and costly.

Project Overview

END-BC will complement research into B cells to produce an ACT that improves treatment efficacy against breast cancer while reducing side effects and costs from effective therapy. Our research developed novel biomaterials to overcome significant obstacles to successfully enhance B cell functions against cancer using a low-cost method.

Research Focus

In END-BC, we will research the commercial and technical feasibility of tailoring the B cell ACT with biomaterials to determine its potential to treat BC.