The INCITE Project: A Short Introduction
The project INCITE, which stands for Immune Niches for Cancer ImmunoTherapy Enhancement, received 4 million EUR from the EU Horizon 2020 Future & Emerging Technologies Open funding platform, which is now part of the EIC Pathfinder umbrella.
EIC Pathfinder supports the early stages of the science and technology research and innovation thqt focuses on new ideas. The overal aim of this programme to advance towards radically new future technologies in all scientific fields.
The INCITE project contributes to this aim by researching pathways to improve current approaches for cancer immunotherapy by generating more robust and active memory phenotypes of anti-cancer T cells, such as CAR-T or TCR- transgenic T cells. In turn, this will lead to more effective treatments for cancer.
We will achieve this through construction of a microenvironment, in the form of an active immune niche that keeps anti-cancer T cells strong, vigilant and persistent both during preparation of the cells outside the body, and after being given to patients.
We will describe and recapitulate the microenvironment of the niches that gives the most potent cells for the task of eradicating the cancer.
INCITE is a multidisciplinary project that combines competences in microfluidic modelling and 3D printing, basic molecular cell immunology, tissue engineering, bioinformatics, experimental and translational cancer immunotherapy and together with communication experts we will embark on the ambition of transforming cell mediated immunotherapy of cancers for the future.
We have assembled the necessary competences from Norway, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Germany and Netherlands from mostly academic institutions but also including a recent Austrian start-up making a new class of 3D printers.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme FET Open, EIC Pathfinder under grant agreement 964955.
