Date: 2014-07-03
Type of information: Grant
Company: TxCell (France) Gene and Cell therapy Unit, Nice (UTCG) (France) Biosafe (Switzerland)
Investors: Conseil Régional Provence-Alpes-Côte-D’azur (France)
Amount: € 417,000
Funding type: grant
Planned used: TxCell is leading the POSITIVE project to automate first production step of Ovasave®, its lead personalised cellular immunotherapy. The project will focus on the development and establishment of a procedure to automate the first step of manufacturing of Ovasave®, TxCell’s lead innovative, personalized cellular immunotherapy for severe refractory Crohn’s disease patients. Biosafe’s Sepax system will enable the automated and standardized separation of mononuclear white blood cells for the production of cellular immunotherapy. The grant totals €417,000, of which TxCell will receive a grant of €250,000 and UTCG will receive €167,000. Both grants will be for the performance of experiments by TxCell and UTCG and the optimization of the resulting new automated and standardized procedure. Biosafe will also utilise its Sepax technology expertise and know-how to optimize the dedicated software and protocol. This project follows the partnership announced with Ferring earlier this year. The process developed by the POSITIVE project will be applicable to a wide range of other cellular immunotherapies, allowing to overcome the constraints of manual methods and to move towards standardized large scale manufacturing in closed systems.The company has completed a phase I/IIa study of its lead product candidate, Ovasave® in refractory Crohn’s disease patients and has reported good tolerability and positive clinical efficacy.
Others: * On July 3 2014, TxCell SA, a biotech developing innovative, personalized cell-based immunotherapies using antigen-specific regulatory T-cells (Ag-Tregs) for chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, announced the launch of, and funding awarded to, the POSITIVE project in collaboration with the Gene and Cell therapy Unit (UTCG) developing new antiviral cell-based immunotherapies and Biosafe, a Swiss private company, a developer of innovative solutions for cell processing.
This collaborative project is accredited by the French competitive cluster Eurobiomed. It is supported by APRF funding (Appel à Projet Recherche Finalisée), from the Conseil Régional Provence-Alpes-Côte-D’azur. The grant totals € 417,000, of which TxCell will receive a grant of € 250,000 and UTCG will receive € 167,000.
Therapeutic area: Autoimmune diseases - Inflammatory diseases
