Biotech Strategy Blog

Commentary on Science, Innovation & New Products with a focus on Oncology, Hematology & Cancer Immunotherapy

Posts tagged ‘Cell therapy’

Next generation of T and NK cell therapies

Taking a leaf out of Wayne Gretsky’s book, we’re continuing our theme round seeking to be inspired and highlighting another batch of early developments, which may offer promise in the future.

Don’t skate to where the puck is – skate to where it will be.

Some of the best innovations come about because scientists think deeply about the challenges and issues preventing therapies from working as they should and ignore dogma in their pursuit of innovation.

These may not necessarily be the most popular approaches of the day, yet they can yield satisfying rewards down the road. In fact, I’d argue it is often the few who go an entirely different way from the crowd who end up being successful in the long run.

In today’s post we highlight some of these enlightening developments, as well as others following solutions looking more obvious at first glance, yet could stumble down the road…

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New developments in the cell and gene therapy landscape

It’s time for an important update on the Cell and Gene therapy landscape.

Can budding new technologies make an impact on CAR-T performance and safety?

Increasingly we are seeing novel technologies being developed in academia and being licensed to biotech companies for use in conjunction with their products.

This cross fertilisation of ideas is a good use of both parties expertise, which will hopefully benefit more patients in the long run.

As we seek improved performance of cell therapy products in terms of potency and persistence, safety becomes an ever more important aspect to watch out for, especially if gene editing is involved.

In this latest post on the C&GT niche, we explore a number of pertinent issues and offer an update on a company not long out of stealth mode…

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Postcard 2 on Adoptive Cell Therapies from the AACR20 Virtual Meeting

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is to be congratulated on turning their annual in-person meeting into a virtual meeting at short notice.

With over 60,000 registered attendees, the meeting is a success and has set the standard for others to follow this year. While we all miss the opportunity to meet and network in-person, a virtual meeting does democratize access to science for scientists and researchers who can’t afford to travel or attend every year and we hope that live-streaming will continue in 2021 and beyond.

Since the sessions are available to watch for free on demand, we’re not repeating the data but like a postcard are instead focusing on what stood out for us, adding some pertinent commentary or context, as well some of our key take homes from a cancer new product development perspective.

Whether you agree, disagree, or thought differently about the presentations, we’re here to provoke thinking and critical discussion.

In this latest postcard from AACR20, we’re focusing on highlights from the adoptive cell therapy session taking place earlier today.

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Life, the world, and the cell therapy universe

In our latest expert interview, we depart from the usual focus on one of two particular or narrow topics and indulge in a more wide ranging discussion to explore a variety of issues facing the IO field and look at them from the perspective of a researcher who is experienced in working with antibodies in various forms.

We cover a lot of ground from CAR-T cells to bispecifics to NK cells – while many people in industry may see these approaches as separate modalities in different niches, in the future we may well see a greater convergent and opportunities for regimens and combinations rather than a more nihilistic either/or approach.

I have long been fascinated with design of molecules and how different tweaks or enhancements can change the way something works – for better or worse. Just as we have learned much from immune agonists and their biphasic curves that result from constant stimulation (and ways to fix that too), so too will we see CARs, T cell engagers, and NK cell therapies adapt and improve in terms of how they are constructed.

Who better to talk about these changes and the learnings to be had lately than someone who has built and tested many antibodies for a living and is now running his own company?

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An up and coming IO company to watch out for

With the continued noise in cancer immunotherapies all too often focused on the now well established checkpoint blockade and CAR-T cell therapies, with bispecifics often seen as the next up and coming area, it is all too easy to forget or perhaps not be aware of plenty of other promising approaches in biotech pipelines.

Who would have guessed a decade ago that any of those three approaches would have ended up as becoming mainstream in the oncology space?

Time for a different perspective on the immunotherapy front?

At ASCO in 2010 I distinctly recall writing enthusiastically about early phase 1 data on ipilimumab, plus BMS–936558 (nivolumab), MK–3475 (pembrolizumab), and MPDL3208A (atezolizumab), while many others were more into eulogising vaccines such Dendreon’s sipuleucel-T (Provenge) and Celldex’s CDX–110, and mainstream outlets explored late stage clinical updates on BRAF inhibition (PLX4032, vemurafenib), targeting ALK (crizotinib), or even Sunesis’s voreloxin (remember that?) – fun times! Many people thought it was crazy to get excited about initial phase 1 data on the immunotherapy antibodies back then and few would have imagined them subsequently garnering a billion dollars a month in revenues back then either.

It’s now time for the horses to change as we continue our look at emerging biotechs with quite different scientific approaches to immunotherapy, which we think are well worth looking at. These are young companies going places with early clinical pipelines and a fresh approach to R&D.

After all, the checkpoint inhibitors mentioned earlier started at the beginning too – look how they turned out, not too shabbily either.

In this latest example, we take a look at a promising biotech’s immunotherapy pipeline through the lens of a CSO’s perspective and chat about the basic immunological underpinings that are driving their scientific innovation… it is well thought out, in my view.

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ESMO19 Highlights from Day 1

Old Post Office in Barcelona

Barcelona – After the torrential rains that hit here earlier in the month at WCLC, it’s glorious weather in Barcelona for the 2019 Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (#ESMO19).

Each day we’ll be providing highlights from the Congress with news, commentary and analysis from various presentations we’ve attended and thought leaders we’ve spoken to.

This ESMO Congress is a really exciting meeting, perhaps one of the busiest we’ve seen in recent years with multiple sessions in parallel to choose from. There are no shortage of data to discuss and review.  In distant years past, ESMO used to be known as the metaphorical dumping ground for negative trials that undoubtedly got lost in hurly burly – no longer! That changed after they started appearing in the Presidential Symposia and having the spotlight shone on the data. It’s now a much more vibrant meeting for clinical development, with an increasing translational focus thrown in too to explain the why and not just the what.  That’s good news for all of us.

To kick off our daily live ESMO coverage, we begin with sharing some useful insights gleaned from what we’ve heard so far plus more will be added throughout the day as we hear from the educational sessions later…

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AACR19 Preview of Cancer Immunotherapy Sessions – Part 1

We’re starting our review of the program for the forthcoming 2019 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (Twitter hashtag to follow: #AACR19) with a look at the cancer immunotherapy program.

One of the challenges of a large meeting is that it’s like a smorgasbord or buffet in a hotel that’s resplendent in choices, but you can’t possibly eat it all.

Choices!

Some choose to follow a research area, others a target or tumor type. There’s a lot of ways to segment the program depending on your specific interests.

However, it’s a good idea to have a plan in place ahead of a large conference such as AACR, even if you modify it as you go to take into account evolving needs.

Seasoned conference goers will be familiar with the maxim known as “the law of two feet” – if a session you are in doesn’t live up to expectations or meet your needs and something else looks more to your taste from the tweets, then simply dash off to another!

In our latest conference preview, we’ve taken a careful look at the cancer immunotherapy track.

What are some of the key sessions to put on your calendar if you’re following this track or have an interest in this area?

In Part 1, we review the IO sessions from Friday to Sunday then tomorrow in Part 2, we’ll review the schedule from Monday to Wednesday.  Yes, it’s that intense this year! Just think, five years ago you had to search the program really quite hard indeed to even find much on immuno-oncology, as it was very much in its infancy then.

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A tale of 3 cellular therapy companies

London – last week a half day event at The Francis Crick Institute looked at three UK cell therapy companies that have been spun out of academic research from partner institutions, UCL and King’s College London.

Medicine at Crick Welcome

Professor Julian Downward welcomes everyone to The Crick

We heard from the CEOs of Achilles Therapeutics, GammaDelta Therapeutics and Autolus Therapeutics on how they are translating science into new adoptive cellular therapies.

There were also presentations from leading scientists whose research they are commercializing.

All three companies were founded in 2016, so the event was a fascinating snapshot as to where are they now, roughly 3 years on, what have they achieved and where are they going.

They vary in terms of their vision, innovation and their adoptive cellular therapy approach.

Autolus are developing autologous CAR-T cell therapies, GammaDelta Therapeutics are focusing on allogeneic Vδ1 gamma delta (ϒδ) T cells, while Achilles Therapeutics are targeting patient-derived clonal neoantigens.

If you couldn’t make this Medicine at the Crick event, what were some of the take home messages, and how do we think these companies compare to some of their competitors?

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A novel approach to cell therapy

We’ve written extensively about various cellular therapy approaches in hematologic malignancies involving T cells and natural killer (NK) cells over the last few years, but if we are to see significant lasting success in solid tumours then we may need to consider the involvement of other immune cells.

Indeed, if they can be engineered in some way to enhance the anti-tumour response then they might turn out to rather useful in combination with existing established approaches such as checkpoint blockade as a way to generate more responses.

How do we go about achieving this state?

There are some very intriguing and different approaches in early development that we plan to follow over time. Here, we explore this potential and the possibilities through our latest in-depth expert interview…

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Iraj Ali leads the way at Achilles Therapeutics

There is a lot of interest of late in targeting neoantigens in cancer therapeutically.

At the recent European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) meeting, we heard Dr Patrick Ott from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute present the latest clinical data for Neon’s cancer vaccine approach (See: interview with Dr Ott).

If you have an interest in neoantigen based cancer treatments, however, then a company on the horizon that we’re excited about is Achilles Therapeutics.

It’s an early stage private UK company, in what is very much still a developing and emerging field. Founded just over two years ago, it has a strong academic pedigree. The scientific co-founders are Professors Karl Peggs, Mark Lowdell, Charles Swanton and Sergio Quezada.

BSB readers will recall our prior interviews with Prof Charlie Swanton FRS (See: here and here), where he talked about the groundbreaking TRACERx study he’s leading, some of the insights it is generating regarding neoantigens, and their importance in cancer evolution.

Achilles Therapeutics was established to commercialise the intellectual property being generated from the TRACERx program.

While in London en-route to ESMO18, the CEO of Achilles Therapeutics, Dr Iraj Ali kindly spoke to BSB about where the company is, and some of its future plans.

From what we heard, it’s definitely a company we can expect to hear a lot more about in the cancer immunotherapy space. Check it out!

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