Date: 2015-06-05
Type of information: Development agreement
Compound: adoptive immunoregulatory cell therapy including PD-L1 programmed CD34+ cell
Company: Fate Therapeutics (USA - CA) Boston Children\'s Hospital (USA - MA)
Therapeutic area: Autoimmune diseases
Type agreement: development
Action mechanism: cell therapy/immunotherapy product
Disease: type 1 diabetes
Details: * On June 5, 2015, Fate Therapeutics announced that it has entered into a two-year sponsored research agreement with Boston Children\'s Hospital to accelerate the development of an adoptive immunoregulatory cell therapy to treat autoimmune diseases. The collaboration seeks to assess the potential of Fate\'s PD-L1 programmed CD34+ cellular therapeutic as a transformative treatment for type 1 diabetes. The Company\'s adoptive immunoregulatory cell therapy is currently undergoing preclinical testing across a range of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. The research program will be led by Paolo Fiorina, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children\'s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Under the agreement, Dr. Fiorina will investigate the potential of Fate\'s PD-L1 programmed CD34+ cellular therapeutic to abrogate autoimmune activity responsible for the destruction of pancreatic beta cells and the development of type 1 diabetes. Preclinical data from the Fiorina laboratory presented at the American Diabetes Association\'s 75th Scientific Sessions in Boston, Mass., shows that genetically engineered PD-L1+ hematopoietic cells adoptively transferred into hyperglycemic mice traffic to the pancreas, reduce aberrant T cell activity and revert hyperglycemia in a well-established murine model of type 1 diabetes. "Our research revealed that human CD34+ cells from individuals with type 1 diabetes have reduced expression levels of PDL1, and that genetically engineered hematopoietic cells can induce anergy of auto-reactive T cells in vivo by leveraging the immunosuppressive properties of the PD-L1 / PD-1 pathway,\" said Dr. Fiorina. \"Fate\'s clinically validated ex vivo cell programming platform offers a promising approach to therapeutically harness these exciting preclinical proof-of-concept data, and we look forward to evaluating the potential of the Company\'s adoptive immunoregulatory cell therapy to transform the treatment of type 1 diabetes.\"
The partnership brings together Boston Children\'s pioneering research on the immunoregulatory properties of hematopoietic cells and Fate\'s innovative platform for programming the in vivo biological activity and therapeutic potential of hematopoietic cellular therapeutics. Using its platform, Fate Therapeutics discovered a combination of pharmacologic modulators to promote rapid and supra-physiologic activation of PD-L1 on the surface of human CD34+ hematopoietic cells. The Company has shown that these programmed CD34+ cells recognize and significantly reduce the proliferation rates of activated T cells in vitro as compared to unmodulated human CD34+ hematopoietic cells.
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