Christopher Klebanoff, MD

Titles and Affiliations

Associate Member and Attending Physician

Research Area

Expanding and enhancing immunotherapy options for patients with breast cancer.

Impact

Immune checkpoint inhibitors have changed cancer care, but most breast cancers do not respond because they lack enough immune cells that can recognize and attack the tumor. Adoptive cell transfer (ACT) can solve this by reprogramming a patient’s immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells. ACT approaches have already shown remarkable success in blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, with some patients achieving long-term remission. Dr. Klebanoff and his team have identified a potent immune cell receptor that targets the most common mutation (R175H) in TP53, the gene most often mutated in breast cancer. TP53 mutations produce abnormal protein fragments that are displayed on the cell surface, making it an ideal target for ACT. These pre-clinical experiments are paving the way for a first-of-its-kind therapy that could bring the benefits of immunotherapy to more patients with breast cancer.

What’s Next

The team will complete final pre-clinical studies, submit data for FDA approval, and begin manufacturing the therapy. These steps are essential to launch a groundbreaking clinical trial testing whether precision-engineered immune cells can safely and effectively treat breast cancer.

Biography

Christopher Klebanoff, MD is a cellular immunologist and medical oncologist with over 20 years of experience in the pre-clinical and early clinical development of T cell-based immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer. Prior to joining Memorial Sloan Kettering and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in 2016, he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Scholar and Assistant Clinical Investigator at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Dr. Klebanoff pioneered the paradigm that T cell subsets with the memory-like attributes of self-renewal and multipotency are a critical determinant for adoptive immunotherapy efficacy. Further, he resolved how host lymphodepletion – a standard practice for nearly all cellular immunotherapies – enhances the potency of adoptively transferred T cells through the removal of homeostatic cytokine “sinks.” The Klebanoff laboratory is currently focused on the discovery and immunologic targeting of shared neoantigens resulting from recurrently mutated driver genes using TCR gene therapy.

Clinically, Dr. Klebanoff has contributed to the successful early phase development of numerous T cell-based therapies. These include an anti-CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that would become FDA approved (Yescarta®), tumor infiltrating lymphocyte therapy for the treatment of melanoma (Lifileucel) and other common cancers, and TCR gene therapies targeting epitopes derived from NY-ESO-1 (Letetresgene), MAGE-A3, and HPV16.

Dr. Klebanoff is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award and a National Institutes of Health MERIT Award. Multiple technologies developed in his laboratory have been licensed to biotechnology companies and he is a scientific co-founder of Affini-T Therapeutics.