Agreements

Date: 2016-07-26

Type of information: Licensing agreement

Compound: Artificial Thymic Organoid (ATO) cell culture system

Company: Kite Pharma (USA - CA) The Regents of the University of California (USA - CA)

Therapeutic area: Technology - Services - Cancer - Oncology

Type agreement: licensing

Action mechanism:

cell therapy. The technology is based on research led by Gay M. Crooks who has developed and refined an artificial thymic organoid (ATO) cell culture system that replicates the human thymic environment to support efficient ex vivo differentiation of T-cells from primary and reprogrammed pluripotent stem cells. This system is an in vitro model that artificially mimics the thymic environment to recapitulate human T-cell development. The ATO system supports efficient differentiation and positive selection of normal T-cells using hematopoietic stem cells from various sources, as well as pluripotent stem cells, like embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. The technology also offers flexibility for further gene engineering to produce off-the-shelf allogeneic engineered T-cell products for therapeutic use.

Disease:

Details:

• On July 26, 2016, Kite Pharma announced that it has entered into an exclusive, worldwide license agreement with The Regents of the University of California , on behalf of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for technology to advance the development of off-the-shelf allogeneic T-cell therapies from renewable pluripotent stem cells. The technology is based on research led by Gay M. Crooks , M.D., who has developed and refined an artificial thymic organoid (ATO) cell culture system that replicates the human thymic environment to support efficient ex vivo differentiation of T-cells from primary and reprogrammed pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Crooks is the Rebecca Smith Professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA . She is also a Co-director of the Broad Stem Cell Research Center and Director of the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Program at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center . Under the terms of this agreement, Kite will receive exclusive rights to use the licensed technology to develop and commercialize T-cell products in oncology. In connection with the license agreement, Kite has entered into a Sponsored Research Agreement with UCLA to support ongoing preclinical research in Dr. Crooks' laboratory to optimize the ATO platform.

Financial terms:

Latest news:

• On April 4, 2017, Kite Pharma announced a publication in Nature Methods that describes pre-clinical findings demonstrating that a novel serum-free, 3-dimensional cell culture technology, known as the Artificial Thymic Organoid (ATO) cell culture system, recapitulates T-cell differentiation ("Generation of mature T cells from human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells in artificial thymic organoids"). The findings support the potential of ATO technology to generate off-the-shelf engineered T cells to treat cancer and other diseases. The research was led by Gay M. Crooks at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The ATO cell culture system mimics the function of the human thymus to allow differentiation of fully functioning T cells from hematopoietic stem cells. Importantly, the ATO cell culture system allows engineering of the T-cell receptor during T-cell differentiation, making the system potentially suitable for the generation of off-the-shelf engineered T cells from renewable cell source.