Date: 2016-01-11
Type of information: Publication of results in a medical journal
phase:
Announcement: publication of results in Nature Medicine
Company: Ziopharm Oncology (USA - MA)
Product: Sleeping Beauty transposon-transposase system
Action
mechanism: cell therapy/immunotherapy product/gene therapy. The Sleeping Beauty transposon-transposase is a non-viral system for introducing genes encoding T-cell receptors and chimeric antigen receptors into lymphocytes that was exclusively licensed to Ziopharm and its collaboration partner, Intrexon, through an agreement with the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Disease:
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology
Country:
Trial details:
Latest
news: * On January 11, 2016, Ziopharm Oncology announced that its Sleeping Beauty non-viral gene transfer technology was featured in a perspectives article in the January 2016 issue of Nature Medicine (Volume 22, Number 1, 26—36), titled "Prospects for gene-engineered T cell immunotherapy for solid cancers ". The article describes how adoptive transfer of receptor-engineered T cells has produced "impressive results in treating B-cell leukemias and lymphomas," but that effective treatment of solid cancers using a similar approach based upon pursuing shared tumor antigens is unlikely. It suggests that the success of cell-based immunotherapies for solid tumors may come from the "arduous task of targeting the unique set of mutations that cause each patient's cancer." Because of the challenges of achieving this goal, the authors note that nonviral integration systems can be considerably cheaper to manufacture and easier to implement for single-use applications compared with viral vectors and that, among these, Sleeping Beauty has advanced farthest in clinical development.
