- Prescient Therapeutics (PTX) partners with the largest cancer centre in the US to create best-in-class, adaptable CAR-T cell therapies to treat certain cancer types
- The company will collaborate with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to combine the OmniCAR and Eclipse research platforms
- Under the partnership, OmniCAR cells and binders will be manufactured and tested by the Eclipse team, with the companies to share costs and ownership of the resulting product equally
- PTX believes combining the research platforms has the potential to result in synergies including increased efficacy and a broader spectrum of cancer killing
- Shares in Prescient Therapeutics are up 2.78 per cent to 18.5 cents at midday AEST
Prescient Therapeutics (PTX) has partnered with the largest cancer centre in the US to create best-in-class, adaptable CAR-T cell therapies to treat certain cancer types.
The company will collaborate with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MD Anderson) to combine research platforms.
This includes Prescient’s OmniCAR modular plug-and-play CAR platform and MD Anderson’s undisclosed propriety binder discovered by its Eclipse platform.
The Eclipse platform has a broad sample library to use in its research for uncovering unique binders for CAR-T therapies targeting blood cancer cells.
These binders are T-cell receptor-like antibodies and can target proteins that are usually on the inside of tumour cells, with no expected cross-reactivity to healthy tissues.
PTX said this process was important when targeting cancer cells that did not express appreciable levels of tumour-associated antigens on their surface.
Managing Director and CEO Steven Yatomi-Clarke said he believed OmniCAR was a “transformational” platform for cellular immunotherapy.
“Adding this TCR-like binder to Prescient’s armament changes the game by now being able to also target aberrant proteins inside the cancer cell that have been brought to the cell surface,” he said.
Prescient said it believed combining the research platforms had the potential to result in synergies including increased efficacy and a broader spectrum of cancer killing.
Under the partnership, OmniCAR cells and binders will be manufactured and tested by the Eclipse team, with the companies to share costs and ownership of the resulting product equally.
Shares in Prescient Therapeutics were up 2.78 per cent to 18.5 cents at midday AEST.