Technological projects portfolio

Lung cancer is the third most common form of cancer with 1.82 million cases, and the one with the highest mortality rate (1.59 million). Existing treatments are of limited effectiveness, and therefore new strategies are needed.

Progress has been made thanks to immunotherapies targeting immune checkpoints (interaction between the lymphocyte receptor PD-1 and its tumour ligand), but only a minority of patients respond to this type of treatment.

The NRP-THERAPY team has revealed a new biomarker, neuropilin-1 (NRP1), present in CD8+ T lymphocytes infiltrating human pulmonary tumours which express the PD-1 receptor.

The project has two aims: to show that NRP-1 can be a predictive biomarker of patient response to immunotherapy targeting PD-1, and that it can be selective for a specific T lymphocyte population of tumour antigens for the purpose of adoptive cell transfer therapy.

The NRP-THERAPY Project will make it possible to propose suitable treatments by identifying the patients suffering from lung cancer who are most likely to respond to anti-PD-1 immunotherapy, or by proposing adoptive transfer of tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL), a highly promising form of treatment for solid tumours that can be used in combination with other therapeutic strategies. The method can then be extended to other types of cancer.