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Paul F. Robbins, Ph.D.

Surgery Branch Tumor Immunology Section Staff Scientist (Facility Head) CRC 3-5744 Bethesda, MD 20854 Phone:   301 402-2069 Fax:   301 451-6949 E-Mail:   Paul_Robbins@nih.gov

Research

My group is focused primarily on 2 projects: studies of the association of characteristics of tumor reactive T cells administered to patients and clinical response and the generation of high affinity TCRs for the treatment of patients with cancer. These studies have demonstrated that T cell persistence as well as the telomere length of administered T cells is associated with clinical response. Additional studies have indicated that expression of the cellular differntiation marker CD27 is associated with response to therapy. Recent studies have focused on examining the effects of amino acid substitutions in the combining regions of the a and b chains of tumor reactive TCRs have resulted in the identification of high affinity variants of 3 TCRs that lead to enhanced tumor recognition. Current studies are focused on enhancing the function of additional TCRs as well as generating high affinity chimeric receptors consisting of antibody combining regions directed against moleucles that are highly expressed on the surface of tumor cells as well as tumor vasculature that are linked to T cell signalling chains for use in additional T cell adoptive immunotherapy protocols.

This page was last updated on 9/10/2008.