The TDIG Webinar is held from 12-1 pm on the third Friday of every month. View past webinar information.
This Month's Webinar
Dr. Timothy Lu, M.D., Ph.D.
Title: Engineering Logic Gates for Highly Specific Cell Therapies
Date and Time: May 16, 2025, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m., EST
Presenter: Timothy Lu, M.D., Ph.D., CEO / Co-Founder
Summary
One of the central challenges in treating cancers is achieving high discrimination between cancer and healthy cells so that targeted therapeutic activity can be selectively focused only on the cancer cells. Historically, the major strategy to address this issue has been to identify single targets that are highly expressed on cancer cells but are minimally expressed on healthy cells. However, for many cancers, such ‘clean’ targets are challenging to identify, may not be expressed on all cells of the tumor, or simply do not exist.
To tackle this problem in a fundamentally different way, we developed Logic Gates in genetically engineered chimeric-antigen receptor (CAR) cell therapies. These Logic Gates recognize multiple surface antigens on both cancer cells and healthy cells to achieve enhanced efficacy (OR gate) and specificity (NOT gate) against cancer cells over healthy cells. Specifically, our OR gate concurrently targets multiple cancer antigens to achieve broader killing of heterogeneous cancer cell populations (e.g., ‘kill’ if target A or B are present), while our NOT gate enables cell therapies to recognize healthy tissue antigens and protect those healthy cells from being killed (e.g., ‘do NOT kill’ if C is present).
We recently presented positive Phase 1 clinical, correlative, and preclinical data on SENTI-202, a first-in-class off-the-shelf logic-gated selective CD33 OR FLT3 NOT EMCN CAR NK cell therapy for blood cancers, including acute myeloid leukemia (AML). SENTI-202 is designed to selectively kill AML blasts and leukemic stem cells while sparing healthy hematopoietic stem & progenitor cells. At AACR 2025, we announced that 4 of 7 best response evaluable patients achieved cCR (composite complete response) with minimal residual disease (MRD) negative status (no detectable disease), with ongoing durability of 4+ to 8+ months. This technology can also be extended to solid tumors.
About Dr. Timothy Lu
Dr. Lu is CEO and Co-Founder of Senti Bio. Previously, Dr. Lu was a tenured MIT faculty member in the departments of Biological Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and has been a co-founder of a number of biotechnology companies.
Dr. Lu earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering from MIT. Dr. Lu has extensive experience in the field of synthetic biology and has received numerous awards: NIH New Innovator Award, US President Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, MIT Technology Review’s TR35, Navy and Army Young Investigator Prizes and others.