On Demand Webinar

Efficacy and irAE Assessment Of Therapeutic Antibodies With Target Specific Knock-In Models

Presenter: Dr Hongjuan Zhang, Senior Scientist, Cancer Biology and Immunology

The preclinical development of human-specific immunotherapeutics is currently hampered by a lack of in vivo immunotherapy models for efficacy testing that feature human targets in the presence of a functional immune system. There's also a need to study unique immune-related adverse events (irAEs), caused by I/O agents potentiating tumor-reactive immune responses, leading to on/off target non-specific immune attack.

In this webinar, Dr Hongjuan Zhang explores novel HuGEMM™ and HuCELL™ platforms for assessing human-specific immunotherapies. These models feature humanized drug targets replacing their murine counterpart on host T cells or tumor cells and within a fully functional murine immune system. Hongjuan also presents the latest research applying these platforms to assessing immune related toxicities, to accelerate immuno-oncology drug discovery programs.

Watch this Webinar to Explore:

• How to use human knock-in models to study clinically-observed immune toxicities related to preclinical I/O drug development
• The evaluation of urelumab efficacy and liver toxicity using the CD137 HuGEMM model and a chimeric mIgG1 version of the compound
• The assessment of a human CD40 agonist to study efficacy and both in vitro- and in vivo-mediated immune toxicity using the CD40 HuGEMM model
• How to use a PD-1/CTLA-4 double knock-in HuGEMM model to mimic clinically observed irAEs, and how to accelerate a new candidate’s safety assessment by de-risking irAEs
• The effects of CD47 immune checkpoint inhibitors on efficacy and erythrocyte toxicity

Who Should Watch:

• Oncology researchers studying immune checkpoint inhibitors with related in vivo toxicities
• Scientists interested in learning how in vivo models are used to evaluate human-specific therapies for both efficacy and toxicity within the same animal model
• Researchers looking to understand how human knock-in model systems are used to interrogate I/O drug mechanism of action and related toxicity

Watch Now!

About The Presenter:

Hongjuan Zhang, PhD, Senior Scientist, Cancer Biology and Immunology focuses on in vitro and in vivo immuno-oncology assay development. Dr Zhang received her PhD from the School of Life Science at Tsinghua University, Beijing. She performed her postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Biological Science (NIBS, Beijing), where she studied the tumorigenesis of lung cancer using genetically engineered mouse models. Hongjuan also trained as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Surgery, University of Michigan, studying the role epigenetic modifiers in regulating T cell activation in the context of tumor immunology.