Challenges and solutions for therapeutic TCR-based agents.

Recent development of methods to discover and engineer therapeutic T-cell receptors (TCRs) or antibody mimics of TCRs, and to understand their immunology and pharmacology, lag two decades behind therapeutic antibodies. Yet we have every expectation that TCR-based agents will be similarly important contributors to the treatment of a variety of medical conditions, especially cancers. TCR engineered cells, soluble TCRs and their derivatives, TCR-mimic antibodies, and TCR-based CAR T cells promise the possibility of highly specific drugs that can expand the scope of immunologic agents to recognize intracellular targets, including mutated proteins and undruggable transcription factors, not accessible by traditional antibodies. Hurdles exist regarding discovery, specificity, pharmacokinetics, and best modality of use that will need to be overcome before the full potential of TCR-based agents is achieved. HLA restriction may limit each agent to patient subpopulations and off-target reactivities remain important barriers to widespread development and use of these new agents. In this review we discuss the unique opportunities for these new classes of drugs, describe their unique antigenic targets, compare them to traditional antibody therapeutics and CAR T cells, and review the various obstacles that must be overcome before full application of these drugs can be realized.

Unpredicted phenotypes of two mutants of the TcR DMF5.

When a T-cell Receptor (TcR) interacts with its cognate peptide-MHC (pMHC), it triggers activation of a signaling cascade that results in the elicitation of a T cell effector function. Different models have been proposed to understand which parameters are needed to obtain an optimal activation of the signaling. It was speculated that improving the binding of a TcR could bring a stronger pMHC recognition, hence a stronger stimulation of the T cell. However, it was recently shown that an increase in affinity does not seem to be sufficient to guarantee improved functionality. A combination of factors is necessary to place the modified TcR in an optimal functional window. We here compared the binding parameters of two mutants of the melanoma antigen peptide MART-127-35 specific TcR DMF5. The first mutant was previously isolated by others in a screen for improved TcR. It was reported to have an increased CD8-independent activity. We confirmed these data and showed that the enhancement was neither due to change in half life (t1/2) nor Kd of the pMHC-TcR complex. The second mutant was designed based on a previous report claiming that a particular polymorphic residue in the TRAV12-2 chain was stabilizing the TcR. We created a DMF5 mutant for this residue and showed that, unexpectedly, this TcR had acquired a reduced overall activity although the TcR-pMHC complex was more stable when compared to the TcR wild type complex (increased t1/2). In addition, the soluble TcR form of this mutant bound target cells less efficiently. From this we concluded that kinetic parameters do not always predict the superior functionality of mutant TcRs.