Speaker Interview: Cassian Yee

Can you tell us a bit about your background and experience within TCR based therapies, and what you will be sharing at the event this year?

My work over the past 25+ years has focused on harnessing endogenous and engineered T cells to treat solid tumors. At MD Anderson, my lab developed the Endogenous T Cell (ETC) therapy platform — isolating, expanding, and reinfusing a patient's own tumor-reactive T cells without genetic modification, that has allowed us to gain insights in to prospectively generating bona fide central memory T cells, by epigenetic reprogramming, that are clinically proven and inform other modalities such as TIL, TCR- and CAR-T. We've also built IPD-STAR, an immunopeptidomics database for identifying shared tumor-specific targets, and the AMP-TCR platform for AI-guided TCR engineering. At the summit I'll be discussing how these converging technologies are reshaping what's possible for TCR-based therapy in solid tumors.

 

Looking at 2026 and further into the future, what do you think success for the TCR field will look like?

Success will mean moving beyond the hematologic malignancy playbook and achieving durable responses in solid tumors , a goal that has eluded the field for years. Concrete milestones will include truly validated shared tumor targets, TCRs with optimized affinity and co-receptor independence, and manufacturing processes scalable enough for broad patient access. Ultimately, the field succeeds when a patient with a common solid tumor can receive a TCR therapy off-the-shelf or near-off-the-shelf within a practical clinical timeframe.

 

From your perspective, what differentiates the most successful TCR programs from those that struggle to translate into the clinic?

Target selection is the foundation : programs built on truly tumor-specific antigens (whether neoantigens, cancer-germline antigens, or immunopeptidomics-validated shared targets) have a fundamentally different risk profile than those chasing suboptimal or widely expressed targets. Beyond that, the functional fitness of the T cell product matters enormously: a TCR with perfect specificity delivered in an exhausted or terminally differentiated cell will underperform. The programs that translate successfully tend to integrate target biology, TCR engineering, and cell manufacturing optimization as an integrated pipeline rather than sequential handoffs.

 

What are you most looking forward to at the TCR Based Therapies Summit? Are there any particular sessions or topics that you’re excited about?

I'm particularly interested in sessions addressing the tumor microenvironment and strategies to sustain TCR T cell function in immunosuppressive solid tumor settings - this remains the central unsolved problem. I'm also looking forward to discussions around next-generation target discovery and how AI/ML tools are being applied to TCR engineering and epitope prediction. And frankly, the random conversations in the hallways are often as valuable as the formal sessions.

 

Why do you believe gatherings like the TCR Based Therapies Summit are especially important for the field right now?

The TCR field is at an inflection point. We have converging advances in target discovery, TCR affinity engineering, manufacturing, and our understanding of T cell epigenetics and exhaustion, but these threads are largely being pursued in parallel by different groups. Summits like this are where cross-pollination happens. They accelerate the field by compressing years of incremental awareness into two days of direct exchange between the people doing the work.