Avacta Announces CAR-T Cell Therapy Research Collaboration

Avacta Group plc recently announced a research collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) to evaluate the use of Avacta’s Affimer technology in novel CAR-T cell-based immunotherapy.

CAR-T immunotherapy is a form of cancer treatment in which the patient’s own immune system T cells are modified to give them greater potency with which to attack cancer cells (see Notes). Treatments using these engineered immune cells have generated promising responses in patients with advanced cancers and CAR-T immunotherapy has become an intense area of research, clinical development, and investment.

The simple structure and biophysical properties of Affimers potentially provide significant advantages over antibody fragment technology currently used in CAR-T cell modification and the collaboration is intended to demonstrate a new class of CAR-T cell therapy that incorporate Affimer molecules.

The collaboration will be led by Renier J. Brentjens, MD, PhD, Director of Cellular Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

As part of the collaboration Avacta will develop Affimer molecules that bind different regions of CD19, a surface protein specific to B-cells involved in lymphomas. Dr Brentjens’ team will construct CAR-T cells incorporating these Affimer molecules and test their anti-tumour function in vitro and in in vivo animal efficacy models.

Under the terms of the agreement the ownership of the results generated directly as part of this collaboration will be shared between Avacta and MSK.

“CAR-T cell therapy is an emerging and very exciting area of immuno-oncology, which holds enormous clinical potential. We are delighted to be working with a world-leading team in the field to demonstrate the benefits that Affimer technology could bring to CAR-T therapy. The generation of positive data in these validated models of disease has the potential to open up highly valuable licensing and partnering opportunities for Avacta in this therapy area, which has attracted so much attention in the past couple of years,” said Dr. Alastair Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Avacta.

Chimeric antigen receptor- or CAR-T cell therapy involves modifying a patient’s own immune cells (T cells) to program them to target and destroy cancer cells. This is achieved by removing a patient’s T cells (white blood cells whose role is to destroy cellular abnormalities and infection) and modifying them so that they present a protein on their surface that targets malignant cells and so that they are activated it in order to kill the cancer cell. The T cells are modified by adding artificial T cell receptor proteins (also known as chimeric antigen receptors) on to the surface of the T cell. The T cells, which can be made to target specifically the patient’s own particular cancer, are then reintroduced into the patient to treat the cancer.

CAR T-cell therapy has been developed over many years and after multiple generations of CAR-T technology has attracted significant investment and large pharma interest in the past few years. The first CAR T cells were developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel in the late 1980s by chemist and immunologist Zelig Eshhar when a tumor’s ability to escape immune recognition by silencing part of the immune response was beginning to be understood.

Over the past few years, the industry has been a hive of activity, with several companies doing deals, such as Juno, Kite, Bellicum, Novartis, Pfizer, Amgen, Celgene and others, reflecting the perceived financial potential of these therapies as well as the priority being given to these therapies by the regulators for filling unmet medical needs.

Avacta’s principal focus is on its proprietary Affimer technology, which is a novel engineered alternative to antibodies that has wide application in Life Sciences for diagnostics, therapeutics, and general research and development.

Antibodies dominate markets worth in excess of $50 billion despite their shortcomings. Affimer technology has been designed to address many of these negative performance issues, principally; the time taken to generate new antibodies, the reliance on an animal’s immune response, poor specificity in many cases, and batch to batch variability. Affimer technology is based on a small protein that can be quickly generated to bind with high specificity and affinity to a wide range of protein targets.

Avacta has a preclinical biotech development program with an in-house focus on immuno-oncology and bleeding disorders as well as partnered development programs. Avacta is commercialising non-therapeutic Affimer reagents through licensing to developers of life sciences research tools and diagnostics.