Cell therapy weekly: Allogeneic CAR-NK therapy trial achieves strong results
Also this week: new automation program funded by EU and new stem cell collaboration tackle neurological diseases.
The news highlights:
Allogeneic NK CAR therapy trial achieves strong results
New automated stem cell therapy initiative for osteoarthritis given €7.45 million of EU funding
New stem cell collaboration between AgeX Therapeutics and University of California Irvine aims to tackle neurological diseases.
Allogeneic NK CAR therapy trial achieves strong results
An allogeneic CAR therapy utilizing umbilical cord blood-derived NK cells has achieved a response rate of 73% in its Phase I/II clinical trial. The treatment, conducted by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (TX, USA), demonstrated significant effectiveness in patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma or chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Researchers are particularly hopeful that the use of allogeneic CAR therapy may overcome many of the obstacles observed in current autologous therapies.
MD Anderson’s CAR NK cell therapy platform was licensed to Takeda Pharmaceuticals (Tokyo, Japan) in 2019, meaning the corporation has exclusive rights to develop and commercialize up to four CAR NK programs, including the CD19 NK therapy demonstrated in the clinical study.
“Due to the nature of the therapy, we’ve actually been able to administer it in an outpatient setting,” commented Katy Rezvani (The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center). “We look forward to building upon these results in larger multi-center trials as we work with Takeda to make this therapy available more broadly.”
New automated stem cell therapy initiative for osteoarthritis given €7.45 million of EU funding
NUI Galway’s Regenerative Medicine Institute (Ireland) will receive €7.45 million of EU funding from the Horizon 2020 program to address the need for industrially relevant, cost effective and automated systems that will allow the manufacturing of regenerative medical treatments.
Following on from the successful AUTOSTEM collaboration with Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology (Aachen, Germany), the new project, autoCRAT, will be led by Mary Murphy, Professor of Regenerative Medicine at NUI Galway’s Regenerative Medicine Institute. AutoCRAT claims it will focus on developing therapies for osteoarthritis as well as furthering our knowledge of stem cell biology.
“This is an exciting interdisciplinary project that will develop new cell therapies for arthritis and provide the platform for automated, robot-enabled manufacturing of the cell products to ensure that patients will benefit in the foreseeable future,” explained Mary Murphy.
New stem cell collaboration between AgeX Therapeutics and University of California Irvine aims to tackle neurological diseases.
AgeX Therapeutics (CA, USA) have announced a new collaboration with the University of California Irvine (CA, USA) to tackle neurological conditions such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s. The collaboration will pair the anti-aging and regenerative medicine biotech company with Leslie Thompson (University of California Irvine), a leading expert in Huntington’s. Utilizing AgeX Therapeutics’s PureStem technology, the research will produce neural stem cells with the aim of developing a cellular therapy for the conditions.
“We are absolutely delighted to start this exciting collaboration with Professor Thompson, who has worked tirelessly over her career to develop a neural stem cell product candidate for Huntington’s disease and who has already generated preclinical animal data that may support the initiation of clinical studies,” stated Nafees Malik (AgeX Therapeutics). “Moreover, we are very excited to be entering the field of neurology, which has huge clinical and commercial potential. Neural stem cells may be very useful in other neurological disorders that are common in aging demographics, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and stroke.”
For more weekly cell therapy news, read previous editions of the cell therapy weekly.
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