ERC Advanced Grant for Michael Platten

Malignant brain tumors are usually incurable diseases that often cannot be completely removed surgically. Cellular immunotherapies that specifically target such brain tumors could be a promising treatment alternative. Michael Platten wants to use artificial intelligence to advance personalized cellular immunotherapies against malignant brain tumours in a project funded by the ERC with 2.5 million euros over five years.

Platten and his team recently invented an innovative approach for the development of cellular immunotherapies: They first isolate T cells from patients' tumor tissue - without knowing the specificity of their T cell receptors. An AI model trained on the genetic sequence data of these T cells can predict which T cell receptors recognize the cancer. This classifier, called "predicTCR ", identifies tumor-reactive T cells with an accuracy of over 90 percent.

The researchers now want to use predicTCR to investigate the genetic programs of tumor-reactive T cells isolated from brain tumors and use these programs to improve the anti-tumor activity of the immune cells.

To obtain therapeutic T cells, the genes of T cell receptors with strong activity against glioblastoma cells must be isolated and transferred to donor T cells. The resulting T-cell receptor transgenic T-cells will then be further tested and prepared for clinical application.

Michael Platten heads the Clinical Cooperation Unit Neuroimmunology and Brain Tumor Immunology and is spokesperson for the Research Program Immunology, Infection and Cancer at the DKFZ, Medical Director of the Neurological University Hospital Mannheim and scientist at the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK). Among numerous other awards, he was honored with the German Cancer Prize in 2019.

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