Dan Shelly, PhD, on Developing an Allogeneic, Adaptable CAR Platform

“We can profile the patient, find out what they need, we pull the appropriate targeting ligand from the freezer, couple it to the cell we pulled from the freezer, and by the end of that day, they are being treated with a customized therapy for their cancer. But the beauty of the system goes beyond that - in addition to the fact that we can treat them specifically for their tumor cells, we can follow them. This is a feedback loop, so once we find out that we've killed all the cancer cells that express those 2 targets, but a small population of cells is starting to grow that are expressing a third targetwe didn't administer, all we have to do is take that SpyTagligand from the freezer and infuse it into the patient. The cells are there, they're ready to be rearmed. And we believe that we can cure this patient.”

Presicent Therapeutics’ OmniCAR universal immune receptor chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) platform is a controllable, multi-antigen targeting platform using a single cell product. The strategy, which consists of a decoupled antigen receptor and T-cell signaling domain, was developed at University of Pennsylvania. OmniCAR also uses a SpyTag/SpyCatcher binding system developed at Oxford University.

Dan Shelly, vice president, business development and alliances, Prescient Therapeutics, presented preclinical data on the OmniCAR platform at the World Oncology Cell Therapy Congress (WOCTC) held April 25-26 in Boston, Massachusetts. CGTLive spoke with Shelly to learn more about the platform, SpyCatcher, and SpyTag technologies and how they could potentially be used to improve the treatment landscape for various cancer types.

Click here to read more coverage of WOCTC 2023.

REFERENCE

Shelly D. Post-infusion controllable CAR therapies with a novel universal immune receptor. Presented at: WOCTC; April 25-26; Boston, Massachusetts.