Evaluation of Therapeutic Natural Killer cells

Cellular immunotherapy has yielded numerous clinical benefits in treating cancer. While many successes involve CAR T cells, unfortunately this potent anticancer cell therapy can cause serious and even fatal complications. Another immune cell, the natural killer cell (NK), may lead to effective treatment without unwanted side-effects. Furthermore, the use of stem cell-derived NKs provides additional advantages, including the ease of gene editing and ready availability of an off-the-shelf therapeutic. We have comprehensively characterized several potential NK products and demonstrated that they are highly cytotoxic against a variety of cancer cells. The intern will extend these studies to engineered NK cells that can specifically kill cancer cells expressing certain proteins.
Ankarys Therapeutics is a Canadian early stage biotech company that uses gene editing and stem cell technology along with scientific and clinical expertise to develop proprietary cell therapy products consisting of safe, powerful, engineered stem cell-derived NK cells.

Faculty Supervisor:

Armand Keating

Student:

Partner:

Ankarys Therapeutics

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Agriculture; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Toronto

Program: