CAR-T grant to Elicera co-founder targets solid tumour persistence

The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) has awarded a four-year CAR-T grant of SEK 4,000,003 to Di Yu at Uppsala University, co-founder of Elicera Therapeutics. The project asks how much baseline activity a chimeric antigen receptor should carry before infusion, and whether that setting decides whether the cell can infiltrate a solid tumour at all.

Tonic signalling, the low-level activity a receptor produces without meeting its target, is conventionally treated as a defect, since too much of it drives the cell toward exhaustion. The hypothesis behind this project inverts that. Receptors aimed at solid tumours, the group argues, need a balanced level of tonic signalling rather than a minimal one, and that balance is part of what separates constructs that work in blood cancers from constructs that stall in the microenvironment of a solid tumour. The team will test a panel of CAR variants, including in glioblastoma models, and the stated output is a set of design rules rather than a single candidate construct. The work runs at the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology at Uppsala University.

The grant comes out of the Swedish Research Council’s medicine and health decision, published on 28 October 2026, which awarded 229 grants worth SEK 1,175,577,330 over the years 2026 to 2031. Yu’s is the only one in the round built around CAR-T cells.

Advanced therapies run through eight of the 229, worth some SEK 49.6 million between them. Lund University took three, among them precision gene therapy for glioblastoma using tailored AAV vectors, and cell and gene therapies for lung repair and immunomodulation in transplantation. Karolinska Institutet holds four, including a SEK 10 million consolidator grant for synthetic, disease-activated gene enhancers in Alzheimer’s disease, and a project on autologous tissue engineering for urogenital reconstruction. Terms run from three to five years.

Elicera Therapeutics expects the results to inform its iTANK platform, which arms CAR-T cells with a transgene encoding a neutrophil-activating bacterial protein. The secreted protein is intended to trigger a parallel CD8+ response against tumour antigens the receptor itself does not recognise, which addresses the same obstacle from the opposite direction: where this project works on the receptor, iTANK works on everything around it.

The grant was decided by the Swedish Research Council through its open call for project grants in medicine and health, assessed by review panel MH-07, and runs for four years. The full list of awarded grants is published on the Swedish Research Council decision page, where the project appears under registration number 2026-03792.