Overview

Twenty million Americans suffer from cancer. Lung cancer accounts for about 12% of new cancer cases and 20% of cancer deaths in the United States in 2024, with a survival rate of 20% (5 years). Current approved treatments for lung cancer include surgically removing the affected section of the lung, radiation, chemotherapy. In subsets of lung cancer cases, mutant epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitors and immune checkpoint blockade are also employed. In most cases, these strategies dramatically decrease quality of life and are ineffective. While chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has changed cancer treatment, leading to remission in previously incurable cancers, solid tumors, including lung cancer, have been notoriously resistant to cellular immunotherapy. This is because most conventional T cells fail to infiltrate the lung tumor microenvironment (TME) and the few that do infiltrate become exhausted. Regulatory T cells (Tregs), a subset of T cells that can be isolated from peripheral blood and are dedicated to inhibiting immune responses, infiltrate and accumulate in the lung TME. We discovered that CAR Tregs directly targeting tumor cells are inflammatory and cytotoxic and will thus infiltrate and eradicate lung tumors. We have our proprietary strategy, proprietary CAR (composition of matter) and proprietary method to maximize CAR Treg persistence.