Date: 2015-04-21
Type of information: R&D agreement
Compound: CAR T-cell therapies
Company: MaxCyte (USA - MD) Johns Hopkins University (USA - MD)
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology
Type agreement: R&D
Action mechanism: cell therapy/immunotherapy product
Disease:
Details: * On April 21, 2015, MaxCyte® announced a strategic research collaboration with Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to develop unique Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, which harness patients’ own immune systems to combat cancers. MaxCyte’s approach to CAR cell therapy allows targeting of solid tumor cancers by enabling control over the on-target, off-tumor toxicity, which limits other CAR therapies to hematological cancers. MaxCyte achieves this by introducing the CAR construct as a transiently expressing messenger RNA (mRNA), thus allowing control of the duration of expression and toxicity against target antigens in normal tissue. This unique approach also avoids the cell expansion step required for standard approaches, dramatically reducing manufacturing time and expense for CAR therapies from days or weeks to a matter of hours. The preclinical work performed in collaboration with JHU will support a future planned Investigational New Drug (IND) filing for a CAR therapy targeting a broad range of solid tumors. No financial terms are disclosed. MaxCyte has developed a next-generation technology–flow electroporation–for the rapid engineering of human cells as therapeutics, enabling the development of safer, more effective and lower cost cell-based therapies for a broad range of applications with blockbuster commercial potential. The company currently has clinical, pre-clinical-partnered, and proprietary products under development and is presently involved in more than a dozen trials. The MaxCyte GT® Flow Transfection System is a universal platform for the rapid, automated loading of CAR-modified mRNA into peripheral blood cells, which avoids the time and cost-intensive cell expansion process. The loading of fresh patient cells with CAR mRNA harnesses immune cells for targeted killing of tumors. This anti-tumor activity is not dependent on the patient’s immune system and is independent of cell surface concentration of the tumor antigen.
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