Join our daily newsletter At The Bell to receive exclusive market insights
- Prescient Therapeutics (PTX) will present new results this week for its OmniCAR drug at the Cell & Gene Meeting on Mesa in California
- The conference brings together senior executives and decision makers on therapies including cell therapy
- The most recent work with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre showed that OmniCAR-T cells begin antigen-directed killing of tumour cells in vitro as soon as they are armed
- It was also discovered that OmniCAR-T cells could be re-armed and continue to kill tumour cells without loss of cytotoxicity
- On the market this morning, Prescient is up 9.09 per cent and trading at 24 cents per share at 11:40 am AEDT
Prescient Therapeutics (PTX) will present new results for its OmniCAR drug at the Cell & Gene Meeting on Mesa in California.
The conference brings together senior executives and decision makers on therapies including cell therapy.
OmniCAR is a universal immune receptor platform allowing controllable T-cell activity and multi-antigen targeting with a single cell product.
The most recent work with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre showed that OmniCAR-T cells begin antigen-directed killing of tumour cells in vitro as soon as they are armed.
It was also discovered that OmniCAR-T cells could be re-armed and continue to kill tumour cells without loss of cytotoxicity.
These new results show the important capabilities of OmniCAR to deliver next generation cell therapies that are controllable and able to target multiple cancer antigens.
Prescient’s Director of Scientific Affairs Rebecca Lim is pleased with the new results.
“Excitingly, we saw for the first time the real-time ‘switchability’ of the OmniCAR system where the tumour killing ability of the OmniCAR-T cells could be redirected towards a different antigen through the addition of a different binder,” Dr Lim said.
“These early wins are extremely encouraging, and we look forward to the next phase
of pre-clinical testing where the OmniCAR technology will be put through its paces using gold standard cancer models.”
Dose response
A dose response relationship is the correlation between the amount of drug given the magnitude of response. Normally, higher doses lead to greater effects.
In cell therapies such as CAR-T therapy, where living cells that continue to grow and divide are administrated to patients, effects are considerably less predictable and controllable.
The aim of OmniCAR is to combine the potent cytotoxicity of cell therapy with the control and predictability of a conventional drug.
Prescient treated glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cells with OmniCAR-T cells armed with varying amounts of SpyTagged EGFRviii and Her2 binders to test whether different doses of binders resulted in equal levels of CAR-T activity.
In both cases, OmniCAR showed dose-dependent tumour killing activity, with the ability to control OmniCAR-T cell activity.
Re-arming
Single infusions of CAR-T cells may be insufficient to drive meaningful patient outcomes in many cancers, especially solid tumours.
Prescient has now shown this “re-arming” capability of OmniCAR. OmniCAR-T cells pre-armed with Her2 binders demonstrated potent ability to kill cancer cells extracting Her2. Following this, the cells were washed and rested for several days, resulting in unarmed OmniCAR cells.
These same OmniCAR-T cells were then capable of being re-armed with Her2 binders, and once again showed the same results.
“This demonstrates that OmniCAR cells can be unarmed, re-armed and still kill with near identical fidelity. It is another example of the flexible yet predictable activity of OmniCAR cells,” the company said.
Managing Director and CEO Steven Yatomi-Clarke is looking forward to present this data at the Cell & Gene Meeting this week.
“It is very pleasing to see a large body of work accomplished successfully so quickly and is a credit to the Prescient team and the incredible collaborators at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre,” he said.
“Importantly, none of these tests have even been optimised, so we have yet to see the true limits of this technology. OmniCAR is proving to be a predictable and powerful system to work with. We look forward to sharing updates as our programs progress.”
On the market this morning, Prescient was up 9.09 per cent and is trading at 24 cents per share at 11:40 am AEDT.
