T-cell engaging bispecific antibody therapy

T-cell engagers (TCEs) are highly potent cancer therapeutics. Designed to coengage T-cells and target antigens on tumors, they can eliminate tumors at very low concentrations. While they have demonstrated success in the clinic when pursuing hematological malignancies, the early inherently active designs have limited tolerability in patients with solid tumors due to low-level target antigen expression in healthy tissues. More recently, TCEs have been designed to overcome their limitations in solid tumor indications, including conditionally active TCEs. While translation of preclinical efficacy studies into the clinic is challenging due to the limitations of testing TCEs in murine tumor models, some models are more rigorous and should be considered ahead of others. As data from patients treated with TCEs becomes more widely disclosed, we gain a better understanding of how to design TCEs to achieve both efficacy and safety in the clinic.