Can Cellectis Revolutionize CAR-T cell immunotherapy?
Cellectis is a Paris based biotechnology company, (NYSE alternext: ALCLS.PA) with an aspiring “blue ocean” strategy that, if successful, could revolutionize cancer immunotherapy.
The potential of using engineered T-cells (known as chimeric antigen receptors) to fight cancer was highlighted by the impressive data presented at last year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH 2013).
To many, the data for the U Penn/Novartis engineered T-Cell therapy (CTL019) in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (pALL) was worthy of presentation in the plenary session at the meeting.
Over the past year, investors have poured money into companies active in the field: we’ve written about the launch of Juno Therapeutics and their intellectual property (IP) dispute with Novartis. More recently Kite Pharma had a successful IPO.
Why was Biotech Strategy Blog keen to interview Cellectis Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) Philippe Duchateau, PhD and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) André Choulika, PhD?
The answer is they have a completely new and innovative approach to CAR-T cell therapy that in the long run could be a “game changer.” Their lead product (UCART19) is an allogeneic CAR T cell for ALL and CLL. Allogeneic means the T cells that are modified come from a donor. This is in contrast to the autologous approaches that Kite, Novartis and Juno are developing where the engineered CAR-T cells come from the patient themselves.
All credit to Pfizer for seeing the potential in a company that has been on our radar for a while. They recently announced a major collaboration with Cellectis that could turn both Cellectis and Pfizer into major players in the cancer immunotherapy space.
In this fast moving R&D space there are already signs of where competition to Cellectis may come from, and it’s not Novartis, Juno or Kite.
Subscribers and those with an interest in CAR-T cell immunotherapy can login to read more, including excerpts of the interview at Cellectis HQ in Paris:
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One Response to “Can Cellectis Revolutionize CAR-T cell immunotherapy?”
Very nice and thorough post as always guys. Seeing the safety problems that Juno had with its drug that led to trial halt for a brief period of time, I’d also watch out for safety issues here, not only related to GvHD, but also cytokine activation. Even more when T cells from healthy donors are expected to be more active. For the sake of disclosure, I’m long Cellectis and I think it has the potential to eventually come out on top in the CAR-T race, but safety is definitely something to whatch out for.
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