Neuroscientist awarded $4.6 million for promising pan-cancer immunotherapy
February 21, 2025
“GlyTR CAR T cells uniquely have the potential to not only treat the vast majority of cancer types, but to do it safely,” says UC Irvine neuroscientist Dr. Michael Demetriou. Photo by Steve Zylius / UC Irvine
Irvine, Calif. — The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has awarded a UC Irvine neuroscientist $4.6 million to advance studies of a novel immunotherapy that holds the potential to revolutionize cancer treatment by uniquely targeting all major cancer types.
The grant for $4,581,144 was awarded to Michael Demetriou, MD, PhD, to accelerate his lab’s groundbreaking work on genetically modified chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells that can destroy tumors by attacking abnormal complex sugar chains called glycans found on the surface of all major cancer cell types.
“This technology has the potential to shift the paradigm for cellular immunotherapy of cancer, extending the benefits for the first time to solid tumors like breast, prostate, pancreatic and ovarian cancer,” said Richard Van Etten, MD, PhD, director of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. “It also illustrates the power of an academic National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, bringing together specialists in different fields to develop transdisciplinary approaches to cancer.”
Demetriou’s lab has been funded by the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative and a previous Quest award from CIRM. His glycans research won early support with a 2017 pilot project award from cancer center’s first UC Irvine Anti-Cancer Challenge fundraising event.
Limits of CAR T cells
CAR T cells are the most potent cancer immunotherapies in clinical use, yet the vast majority of cancer types remain untreatable due to toxicity from cross-reactivity with normal cells, said Demetriou, a professor of neurology, microbiology and molecular genetics at the UC Irvine School of Medicine.
To solve this problem, he and his lab’s scientists — Ani Grigorian, PhD, Raymond Zhou, PhD and Paresh Purohit, PhD — genetically modified CAR T cells to attack the abnormal glycans chains. This technology is called glycan-dependent T cell recruiter, or GlyTR (pronounced glitter).
GlyTR CAR T cells work by attaching themselves to cancer cells, triggering cancer death. The unique Velcro-like binding properties of GlyTR targets cancer cells with high glycan density, while ignoring normal cells with low glycan density. By contrast, current CAR T cells attack cells with both high and low density expression, leading to toxicity for normal tissue.
“GlyTR CAR T cells uniquely have the potential to not only treat the vast majority of cancer types, but to do it safely,” said Demetriou.
“Like the one ring from The Lord of the Rings, GlyTR CAR T cells have the potential to be the one cancer therapy to treat them all. They may also solve the severe bottleneck that limits millions of cancer patients from treatment with CAR T cells.”
Scaling up for human trials
The current grant award is intended to support further translational work needed to bring the novel immunotherapy to clinical trials in partnership with the UC Irvine Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center.
“We are very excited about this research and the CIRM award,” said Aileen J. Anderson, PhD, director of the stem cell research center.
The 30-month grant allows the development of a manufacturing process for the GlyTR CAR T cells at a scale and quality suitable for human use. The research team then will seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin human clinical trials. Consultants on the grant include Van Etten, director of the cancer center, and Farshid Dayyani, MD, PhD, the cancer center’s associate director for translational science.
The clinical studies will be conducted collaboratively between the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and the UCI Alpha Clinic, the clinical trial arm of the stem cell research center.
A second GlyTR cancer therapeutic agent arising from Demetriou’s Cancer Moonshot award is currently in the National Cancer Institute’s Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) program, which is carrying out studies to enable its use in a human clinical trial that may open at the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center by late 2025. This second agent targets a different glycan antigen in cancer T cells.
The UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center is one of only 57 National Cancer Institute-designated U.S. comprehensive cancer centers and the only one based in Orange County, the sixth most populous county in the nation. A research powerhouse, the cancer center brings together basic and translational scientists with clinician investigators to drive discoveries through the pipeline into the clinical arena. The center treats more patients with cancer — and more complex cases — than any other healthcare provider in the region, with more than 80,000 outpatient visits and 65,000 infusion treatments annually at practice sites in Orange, Irvine, Yorba Linda, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Laguna Hills. The center also offers more than 500 clinical trials, including the region’s largest portfolio of early phase and investigator-initiated trials. It has the only adult bone marrow transplant program in Orange County, performing more than 100 transplants a year and enabling critically ill patients to receive life-saving care close to home. It is also one of the few U.S. programs to provide transplants for debilitating autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. With the opening of its second clinical hub in Irvine in July 2024, the cancer center has tripled its space for treating cancer patients and conducting novel studies aimed at bringing an end to cancer. Learn more ›
The UC Irvine Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center is part of a network of leading centers funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.The University of California, Irvine, received more than $165 million in CIRM funding, some of which was matched with private funding to build the stem cell research center. Its scientists have created stem cell-based treatments that reduce the effects of Alzheimer’s disease in animal models, enabled rats with spinal cord injuries to walk again, and they are at the forefront of developing cell therapies to treat Huntington’s disease. In addition, physicians at our clinical arm, the UCI Alpha Clinic, are actively enrolling patients in early-phase clinical trials for retinitis pigmentosa, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, myasthenia gravis, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and cancer. Learn more about our regenerative medicine research ›
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