“Novel Small Molecule-based Approaches for Cancer Immunotherapy”
Cancer immunotherapy has been drawing growing attention as a novel promising therapeutic modality for cancer. Unlike conventional chemo- or radiotherapy, immunotherapy treats cancer by unleashing the suppressed activity of the patient’s own immune system and harnessing its power to fight cancer, to achieve robust anti-tumor responses while minimizing collateral damages to normal tissues. In particular, T cell-based immunotherapeutics such as bispecific antibodies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells have generated unprecedented responses in clinics, and have become promising therapeutic modalities for the treatment of refractory cancers. Despite their success, however, there are several issues, such as unfavorable pharmacokinetics and biophysical properties as well as safety-related issues, associated with these biological drugs, preventing more widespread and safe application of these promising therapeutics. In this talk, I will discuss our recent efforts on addressing these issues by using synthetic small molecule ligands and biorthogonal conjugation chemistry to generate next-generation cancer immunotherapeutics.