Paul F. Robbins, Ph.D.

My group is focused primarily on 2 projects: studies of the association of characteristics of tumor reactive T cells administered to patients and clinical response and the generation of high affinity TCRs for the treatment of patients with cancer. These studies have demonstrated that T cell persistence as well as the telomere length of administered T cells is associated with clinical response. Additional studies have indicated that expression of the cellular differentiation marker CD27 is associated with response to therapy. Recent studies have focused on the identification of mutated antigens recognized by T cells derived from patients with a variety of cancers including melanoma, colon, breast, ovarian and lung cancer by carrying out high-throughput sequencing of tumor DNA and RNA. The results have demonstrated that more mutation reactive T cells can be identified in more than 80% of patients with these common cancers. In addition, treatment of patients with enriched populations of mutation reactive T cells have led to substantial tumor regressions in two patients with gastrointestinal cancers.  Further studies will hopefully lead to the development of highly effective and broadly applicable immunotherapies for the treatment of patients with these solid cancers.