Aflac Seminar Series - Andras Heczey, MD
Location: Zoom
Andras Heczey, MD is a physician-scientist at Texas-Children's Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine with a focus on basic, translational, and early phase clinical research evaluating chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) expressing T cells and Natural Killer T cells (NKTs) to treat solid neoplasms. Dr Hexey's work established the genetic engineering strategy and clinical scale strategies for NKTS and identified the most potent GD2-CAR for further development. He served as the PI of a first-in-human Phase 1 study of these cells in children with relapsed or refractory neuroblastoma. His lab designed glypican-3-CARs (GPC3-CARs), systematically tested these receptors in T cells to optimize costimulatory signals and further enhanced the antitumor properties of GPC3-CAR T cells through TCF1 maintenance by interleukin-15 and -21 coexpression. The findings of this work provided the foundation of six investigator initiated phase 1 clinical studies in adults with liver cancer and children GPC3+ solid tumors, respectively. His current work is focused on employing synthetic programs and CAR-T cells in a "cells-state" or small-molecule regulated manner and in vivo engineering of effector lymphocytes for the next generation of cancer immunotherapeutics.
Dr Heczey will be presenting his seminar entitled "Genetically Engineered Effector Cells to Treat Cancer"