ITUS has entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Moffitt Cancer Center, to advance toward human clinical testing, a Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell (CAR-T) technology aimed initially at Ovarian Cancer, and eventually additional solid tumors. This technology was developed at The Wistar Institute and licensed by ITUS through its majority-owned subsidiary corporation, Certainty Therapeutics.
"Our program with Moffitt will be led by a group of stellar scientists and physicians. We are excited to advance this program which we hope will be the first or one of the first CAR-T technologies that shows efficacy for solid tumors,” Dr. Amit Kumar, President and CEO of ITUS said. “CAR-T technology is a new adoptive cell therapy that has shown tremendous efficacy for refractory cancer patients suffering from B-cell cancers. However, to date, there have been no reports of success on solid tumors in humans."
This CAR-T technology is initially focused on Ovarian Cancer, by engineering killer T-cells with the Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) to target ovarian cells that express the FSH-Receptor. The FSH-Receptor was shown to be a very exclusive protein found on a large percentage of ovarian cancer cells, but not on other healthy tissue.
Marco Davila, M.D., Ph.D., an oncologist with extensive experience in CAR-T cell therapies, will co-lead the IND enabling work.
"As someone that's worked on both the pre-clinical and clinical development of CD19-targeted CAR-T cells I have seen first-hand the power of gene-engineered T cell therapies. However, a major obstacle to the adaptation of this technology, especially to solid tumors, is the safety of the protein targets. The FSH-receptor is an ideal tumor target similar to CD19 since it is widely expressed on tumor cells, but has minimal expression on normal cells. We are hopeful that this could represent the first non-B cell, malignancy that responds to a CAR-T cell therapy," said Dr. Davila.
Other scientists involved in the translation of this technology at Moffitt are Linda Kelley, Ph.D., Director of the Cell Therapy Facilities and Daniel Abate-Daga, Ph.D., an expert of cellular therapies.