Tscan Therapeutics Inc

TScan, headquartered in Waltham, MA, was founded in early 2018 to discover and develop transformational T cell receptor-engineered T cell, or TCR-T, therapies using a novel T-cell target discovery platform developed by Drs. Stephen Elledge and Tomasz Kula at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Our approach is based on the central premise that we can learn from patients who are winning their fight against cancer in order to treat those who are not.

Using one of our proprietary platform technologies, TargetScan, we analyze the T cells of cancer patients with exceptional responses to immunotherapy to discover how the immune system naturally recognizes and eliminates tumor cells in these patients. This allows us to precisely identify the targets of T cell receptors, or TCRs, that are driving these exceptional responses. We aim to use these anti-cancer TCRs to treat patients with cancer by genetically engineering their own T cells to recognize and eliminate their cancer. In addition to discovering TCR-T therapies against novel targets, we are using our ReceptorScan technology to further diversify our portfolio of therapeutic TCRs. We believe this two-pronged approach will enable us to discover and develop a wide array of potential treatment options for patients with cancer.

Since our founding, we have made substantial progress building our target and TCR discovery platform technologies, discovering new targets and TCRs, advancing our two lead programs into IND-enabling studies, developing in-house manufacturing capabilities, and, in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, identifying the targets of T cells from recovering COVID-19 patients. In addition, we have entered into multiple strategic collaborations, including with Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Inc., and QIAGEN Sciences, LLC.

The TargetScan discovery platform enables the identification of the natural target of a T cell receptor, or TCR, using an unbiased, genome-wide, high-throughput screen. We have developed this technology to be extremely versatile and applicable across multiple therapeutic areas, including cancer, autoimmune disorders, and infectious diseases. It can be applied to virtually any TCR that plays a role in the cause or prevention of disease. TargetScan is also designed to identify potential off-targets of a TCR and eliminate those TCR candidates that cross-react with proteins expressed at high levels in critical organs. We believe this will allow us to reduce the risk and enhance the potential safety profile of our TCR-T therapy candidates early in development before we initiate clinical trials.