Benzinga | Jul 21, 2021 07:06AM EDT

TScan Therapeutics to Present Discovery of T Cell Targets for COVID-19 at the Cell-Mediated Therapies for Infectious Disease Summit

TScan Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:TCRX), a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of T-cell receptor (TCR) engineered T cell therapies (TCR-T) for the treatment of patients with cancer, today announced that Gavin MacBeath, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer at TScan, will present the findings of TScan's work to discover the targets of T cells in recovering COVID-19 patients at the Cell-Mediated Therapies for Infectious Disease Summit. The Company published these targets in an October 2020 paper in Immunity, showcasing the power of the company's high-throughput T-cell target discovery platform, TargetScan. The presentation will also feature in vitro data comparing several polyepitope T-cell vaccine candidates based on the Company's novel T cell target discoveries.

"The widespread emergence of new variants of SARS-CoV-2 reinforces the need for next-generation vaccines and treatments that elicit a more natural T cell response to promote long-term immunity to the virus," said Dr. MacBeath. "Our TargetScan technology was able to quickly identify the precise epitope targets in the novel coronavirus that are recognized by the T cells of convalescent patients. We found that these epitopes mostly reside in conserved regions of the virus which are located outside of the Spike protein, and almost none of the mutations observed in the virus to date, including those found in the Delta variant, occur in the novel epitopes identified by TScan. Early studies of vaccine constructs designed with our T cell targets have shown promising in vitro results that warrant continued research in pursuit of second-generation vaccines to assist in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic."

As previously disclosed, TScan has licensed use of these immunodominant epitopes to QIAGEN Sciences, LLC to develop T-cell based tests to detect prior exposure to SARS-CoV-2. The Company has also licensed the TCR sequences discovered during this research to Poseida Therapeutics, Inc. to develop allogeneic T-cell therapies for COVID-19. In addition, TScan is exploring how its findings can also be used to develop next-generation vaccines for COVID-19.