Part of the Joint Division of Cancer Seminar Series, Thursday 23.01.25 @ 15.00, hosted by Dr Olivier Pardo.
We are delighted to have Sébastien Wälchli, PhD, Senior Researcher and Group Leader at the Section for Cellular Therapy, Oslo University Hospital, Norway.
Sébastien studied biology at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and performed an industrial PhD in molecular biology, completed in 2002. He then moved to Norway and worked in cellular biology and cancer immunotherapy. Since 2015, he is group leader at the Translational Research Unit (Oslo University Hospital). The unit consists of a workforce of 19 people (2 PIs, 5 PhD students, 4 postdocs, 1 researcher, 2 master students and 5 engineers). SW ‘s group mainly work on CAR, TCR and other advanced immunotherapeutic products. His main achievements are: (i) Participation to the first ever T cell receptor redirected T cell trial in Scandinavian (NCT03431311) (ii) More than 80 scientific publications and 20 patents (iii) Co-founding of Zelluna Immunotherapy.
Summary of Talk
Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell therapies have shown unprecedented clinical results; however, they still face some major challenges. One of them is the lack of specific target antigens that could be overcome by finding cancer specific antibodies. Sébastien will discuss how his group mined an old hospital antibody collection, most of them were derived from hybridoma of animals injected with tumour, and isolated some surprising CARs.