Meeting on the Mesa 2021 | Remaining challenges in developing cell therapies for cancer

Pascal Touchon, President & CEO, Atara Biotherapeutics, San Francisco, CA, discusses the current progress in successfully developing cell therapies for liquid and solid tumors. In the field of hematological malignancies, cell therapies need to improve their response rate and durability of remission in patients, whereas in solid tumors, developing treatments that are as effective as ones used for liquid tumors remain a challenge. Improving in vivo persistence of cell therapies is one strategy to develop treatments that are more efficacious against solid tumors, as in the case of ATA2271, an chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy targeting mesothelin. This interview took place at Meeting on the Mesa 2021.