Carolyne Barakat

Cancer immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment by harnessing the patient’s own immune system to recognize and eliminate cancer. Among the most promising approaches are adoptive T cell therapies, particularly T cell receptor (TCR)-engineered T cell and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapies. These approaches involve harvesting T cells from cancer patients, genetically engineering them to recognize tumor antigens, and reinfusing the modified cells into the patient.

This lecture will provide an introduction to the principles underlying engineered T cell therapies, beginning with the biology of T cell recognition of cancer and the mechanisms by which tumors evade immune surveillance. It will outline the development process of CAR-T and TCR-T cells, discuss major clinical outcomes in hematological malignancies, and address remaining challenges, including toxicity, antigen escape, and the difficulty of targeting solid tumors with an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. The lecture will also highlight selected areas of my ongoing research, with a particular focus on identifying therapeutic targets for T cell therapies in relapsed hematological malignancies and secondary solid malignancies following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

Overall, the lecture will illustrate how integrating insights from molecular and cellular biology with genetic engineering and translational research can inform the development of next-generation cancer therapies.