Publications by authors named "Attilio Bondanza"

Unlabelled: CAR T-cell product quality and stemness (Tstem) are major determinants of in vivo expansion, efficacy, and clinical response. Prolonged ex vivo culturing is known to deplete Tstem, affecting clinical outcome. YTB323, a novel autologous CD19-directed CAR T-cell therapy expressing the same validated CAR as tisagenlecleucel, is manufactured using a next-generation platform in <2 days.

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Lipid and cholesterol metabolism play a crucial role in tumor cell behavior and in shaping the tumor microenvironment. In particular, enzymatic and non-enzymatic cholesterol metabolism, and derived metabolites control dendritic cell (DC) functions, ultimately impacting tumor antigen presentation within and outside the tumor mass, dampening tumor immunity and immunotherapeutic attempts. The mechanisms accounting for such events remain largely to be defined.

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Background: To date, T cells redirected with CD19-specific chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) have gained impressive success in B-cell malignancies. However, treatment failures are common and the occurrence of severe toxicities, such as cytokine release syndrome (CRS), still limits the full exploitation of this approach. Therefore, the development of cell products with improved therapeutic indexes is highly demanded.

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Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell expansion and persistence represent key factors to achieve complete responses and prevent relapses. These features are typical of early memory T cells, which can be highly enriched through optimized manufacturing protocols. Here, we investigated the efficacy and safety profiles of CAR T cell products generated from preselected naive/stem memory T cells (TN/SCM), as compared with unselected T cells (TBULK).

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Immunotherapy with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)–engineered T cells showed exceptional successes in patients with refractory B cell malignancies. However, first-in-human studies in solid tumors revealed unique hurdles contributing to poor demonstration of efficacy. Understanding the determinants of tumor recognition by CAR T cells should translate into the design of strategies that can overcome resistance.

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Transplacental trafficking of maternal and fetal cells during pregnancy establishes long-term reciprocal microchimerism in both mother and child. Consequently, the maternal immune system may become sensitized to paternal histocompatibility antigens. It has been hypothesized that mother's "exposure" to paternal HLA haplotype antigens during pregnancy may affect the outcome of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) when the mother serves as a donor for the child.

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Design criteria for tissue-engineered materials in regenerative medicine include robust biological effectiveness, off-the-shelf availability, and scalable manufacturing under standardized conditions. For bone repair, existing strategies rely on primary autologous cells, associated with unpredictable performance, limited availability and complex logistic. Here, a conceptual shift based on the manufacturing of devitalized human hypertrophic cartilage (HyC), as cell-free material inducing bone formation by recapitulating the developmental process of endochondral ossification, is reported.

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Activating mutations in the BRAF-MAPK pathway have been reported in histiocytoses, hematological inflammatory neoplasms characterized by multi-organ dissemination of pro-inflammatory myeloid cells. Here, we generate a humanized mouse model of transplantation of human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) expressing the activated form of BRAF (BRAF). All mice transplanted with BRAF-expressing HSPCs succumb to bone marrow failure, displaying myeloid-restricted hematopoiesis and multi-organ dissemination of aberrant mononuclear phagocytes.

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Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell expansion and persistence emerged as key efficacy determinants in cancer patients. These features are typical of early-memory T cells, which can be enriched with specific manufacturing procedures, providing signal one and signal two in the proper steric conformation and in the presence of homeostatic cytokines. In this project, we exploited our expertise with paramagnetic beads and IL-7/IL-15 to develop an optimized protocol for CAR T cell production based on reagents, including a polymeric nanomatrix, which are compatible with automated manufacturing the CliniMACS Prodigy.

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The major cause of death after allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation (HSCT) for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is disease relapse. We investigated the expression of Inhibitory Receptors (IR; PD-1/CTLA-4/TIM-3/LAG-3/2B4/KLRG1/GITR) on T cells infiltrating the bone marrow (BM) of 32 AML patients relapsing (median 251 days) or maintaining complete remission (CR; median 1 year) after HSCT. A higher proportion of early-differentiated Memory Stem (T) and Central Memory BM-T cells express multiple IR in relapsing patients than in CR patients.

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Background: The thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP), a key cytokine for development of Th2 immunity, is produced by cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs) in pancreatic cancer where predominant tumor infiltrating Th2 over Th1 cells correlates with reduced patients' survival. Which cells and molecules are mostly relevant in driving TSLP secretion by CAFs in pancreatic cancer is not defined.

Methods: We performed in vitro, in vivo and ex-vivo analyses.

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HLA-haploidentical haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (haplo-HSCT) is increasingly offered to patients with high-risk acute leukaemia. Unfortunately, haplo-HSCT is followed by a delayed immunoreconstitution. The aim of this EBMT registry study was to explore the clinical impact of lymphocyte subset counts after haplo-HSCT.

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Immunotherapy is emerging as a new pillar of cancer treatment with potential to cure. However, many patients still fail to respond to these therapies. Among the underlying factors, an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME) plays a major role.

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In the clinic, chimeric antigen receptor-modified T (CAR T) cell therapy is frequently associated with life-threatening cytokine-release syndrome (CRS) and neurotoxicity. Understanding the nature of these pathologies and developing treatments for them are hampered by the lack of appropriate animal models. Herein, we describe a mouse model recapitulating key features of CRS and neurotoxicity.

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Over the last 60 years, more than a million patients received hematopoietic cell transplantation. Having incorporated multiple changes in clinical practices, it remains a complex procedure facing a dual challenge: cure of the underlying disease and prevention of relapse while controlling potentially severe complications. Improved understanding of underlying biological processes resulted in the design of innovative therapies engineered from defined cell populations and testing of these therapies as addition or substitution at virtually every step of the procedure.

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Telomerase (TERT) is a ribonucleoprotein enzyme that preserves the molecular organization at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. Since TERT deregulation is a common step in leukaemia, treatments targeting telomerase might be useful for the therapy of hematologic malignancies. Despite a large spectrum of potential drugs, their bench-to-bedside translation is quite limited, with only a therapeutic vaccine in the clinic and a telomerase inhibitor at late stage of preclinical validation.

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Infection-related mortality (IRM) is a substantial component of nonrelapse mortality (NRM) after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT). No scores have been developed to predict IRM before transplantation. Pretransplantation clinical and biochemical data were collected from a study cohort of 607 adult patients undergoing allo-HSCT between January 2009 and February 2017.

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T regulatory cells (Tregs) play a key role in modulating T cell responses. Clinical trials showed that Tregs modulate graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT). However, their ability to mediate anti-leukemic activity (graft-versus-leukemia [GvL]) is largely unknown.

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Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, together with checkpoint inhibition, has been celebrated as a breakthrough technology due to the substantial benefit observed in clinical trials with patients suffering from relapsed or refractory B-cell malignancies. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of the clinical trials performed so far worldwide and analyze parameters such as targeted antigen and indication, CAR molecular design, CAR T cell manufacturing, anti-tumor activities, and related toxicities. More than 200 CAR T cell clinical trials have been initiated so far, most of which aim to treat lymphoma or leukemia patients using CD19-specific CARs.

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