- Prescient Therapeutics will collaborate with Carina Biotech to develop new targeted cell therapies for patients with solid tumours
- The collaboration will combine Prescient’s experience in the development of targeted therapies and Carina’s CAR-T technologies
- It is hoped that this will strengthen Prescient’s pipeline of targeted cancer therapeutics
- Prescient’s share price is up 9.09 per cent today with shares trading for 4.8 cents apiece
Prescient Therapeutics has entered a collaboration with Carina Biotech to develop new targeted cell therapies for cancer patients with solid tumours.
The collaboration will combine Prescient’s expertise in the development of targeted therapies with Carina’s CAR-T technologies to develop CAR-T combination therapies to treat a range of solid tumours.
Work will be undertaken in line with Prescient’s current budget and will not require any additional capital. Both companies will share any resulting intellectual property from the collaboration.
CAR-T cell (Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cell) therapy uses a cancer patient’s own immune system to target and attack cancer.
It involves removing patient T cells, re-engineering them and introducing them back into the body where they target and attack cancer cells.
This technique has already been used against certain blood cancers but has so far been less effective against other haematological and solid cancers.
Many solid cancers have proven extremely difficult to breach using immunotherapies like checkpoint inhibitors, yet account for the majority of cancers diagnosed.
This presents an area of unmet medical need.
“Early pre-clinical data from our CAR-T cells targeting solid tumours has been very positive, and we are actively exploring a number of approaches to enhance response rates in these cancers,” Carina Biotech Managing Director Dr Justin Coombs said.
“We look forward to reaping the benefits of combining expertise, and believe there is an opportunity for these technologies to be used as a platform for multiple new cell and gene therapies that can be applied across a broad range of rare and prevalent cancers,” he added.
CEO and Managing Director of Prescient Steven Yatomi-Clarke is pleased with where the company is heading.
“This is an exciting new frontier for Prescient. We’ve been committed to changing the cancer treatment paradigm with personalised medicine approaches – first with targeted therapies (PTX-100 and PTX-200) and now cellular therapies (CAR-T),” Steven said.
“In many ways, CAR-T is the ultimate personalised medicine, with bespoke modification of an individual patient’s T cells to combat cancer,” he added.
Prescient’s shares are up 9.09 per cent today with shares trading for 4.8 cents apiece at 12:31 pm AEDT.