Our Team
“What excites me most is the energised, passionate group of people we’ve brought together -including world-renowned scientist and rising stars who will become the future leaders in childhood oncology. That’s where out-of-the-box thinking comes from – suddenly, you find you’re learning from each other and working out how you can use each other’s special expertise to tackle a complex problem.”
Professor Catherine Bollard, Children’s National Hospital, USA.
Our Team
“What excites me most is the energised, passionate group of people we’ve brought together -including world-renowned scientist and rising stars who will become the future leaders in childhood oncology. That’s where out-of-the-box thinking comes from – suddenly, you find you’re learning from each other and working out how you can use each other’s special expertise to tackle a complex problem.”
Professor Catherine Bollard, Children’s National Hospital, USA.
About us
The team, co-led by Professor Catherine Bollard (Children’s National Hospital, USA) and Dr Martin Pule (University College London, UK) brings together a multidisciplinary international group of UK, US and French CAR T-cell experts and scientists. The team consists of experts from highly diverse displines including oncology, hematology, immunology, transplantation/cell therapy, glycobiology, proteomics, biostatistics, mathematics and artificial intelligence. The team has extensive know-how translating scientific discoveries to the clinic. Also, embedded within the team are a group of patient advocates bringing the patient/parent perspective to the forefront of the challenge.
The team will develop a genetic engineering ‘tool kit’ designed specifically for children’s solid tumours. This tool kit will be used to engineer T-cells in more advanced ways to overcome the barriers that solid cancers put in their way.
Program Overview
Our central hypothesis is that by coupling deep knowledge of childhood cancer development with advanced cellular engineering technologies along with progressive clinical development will be the fastest route to producing effective cellular therapies for high-risk paediatric solid tumours.
NexTGen combines detailed studies of primary tumours to discover new targets and understand how the tumour microenvironment (TME) destabilises T-cell function. This, along with a closely coupled clinical development programme will guide the progressive engineering of T-cells to result in transformative therapies.
Meet the team
Catherine Bollard
Professor Bollard is the Director of the Centre for cancer and Immunology Research (CCIR) at Children's National Hospital which comprises over 110 personnel including 50 Faculty. She is an immunotherapist with an established track-record and extensive publications translating novel cell therapies of her design from bench-to-bedside for cancer and virus-associated diseases. She is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI).
Martin Pule
Dr Pule leads the UCL CAR-T cell program which comprises over 80 scientists, technicians and regulatory staff. Dr Pule has pioneered development of allogeneic CAR-T cells, automated CAR-T cell manufacture and dual antigen targeting. Twelve T-cell engineering cassettes de-signed by Dr Pule have been tested in first-in-human studies. He has been cited as the most prolific inventor of CAR-T technology by the European patent office.
John Maris
John Maris, MD is physician-scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania who leads multiple multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional research program focused on improving outcomes for children with cancer. His laboratory has discovered all of the genes involved in susceptibility to develop neuroblastoma, many of the key oncogenic drivers, and has developed several novel therapies being tested in clinic.
Irving Weissman
Irving Weissman is a professor of pathology and of developmental biology at the Stanford School of Medicine and is the director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Stem Cell Research at Stanford. His pioneering work in stem cell and cancer biology includes the identification of blood-forming stem cells and their role in blood cancers, as well as the discovery of a “don’t eat me” signal on the surface of many cancer cells that protects them from being eliminated by the immune system.
Emmanuel Donnadieu
Dr. Donnadieu has accumulated thorough experience in cellular imaging related to T cells. His major contributions were the demonstrations of a defect in T cells to infiltrate tumors and the role of matrix fibers and macrophages in this process. His current projects aim at targeting the tumor microenvironment to improve T cell-based immunotherapies using relevant preclinical models (human organotypic). In NexTGen, he is associated to WP2 and 4.
Robbie Majzner
Robbie Majzner is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine who is focused on the development and deployment of immunotherapies for pediatric cancer. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School followed by training in pediatrics at New York Presbyterian-Columbia and pediatric hematology-oncology at Johns Hopkins and the National Cancer Institute. His work in the laboratory centers on engineering platform technologies to improve the efficacy of CAR T cells in solid tumors and overcome therapeutic resistance. Concurrently, he is focused on translating laboratory advances in innovative clinical trials for children with incurable cancers.
Sergio Quezada
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Karin Straathof
Karin Straathof is paediatric oncologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital and Associate Professor in Tumour Immunology at UCL Cancer. Her research interest is T cell-based immunotherapy for childhood solid tumours. Her work led to one of the first phase I clinical studies of CAR-T cell therapy for children with relapsed or refractory neuroblastoma. Her research group now develops cellular therapies incorporating advanced engineering approaches aiming to achieve sustained activity against childhood solid tumours with further clinical studies due to open in 2023.
Kevin Litchfield
Kevin trained in mathematics and bioinformatics, worked in the pharmaceutical industry at Novartis Oncology, completed a PhD in cancer bioinformatics, and completed his postdoctoral training with Prof. Charles Swanton at the Francis Crick Institute. Kevin is now a group leader at UCL Cancer Institute London, specialising in immune-oncology bioinformatics, biomarker development and drug target identification.
