Marty Giedlin, PhD, on Advantages of Allogeneic NK Cell Therapy Approaches

“Basically, we want these natural killers to really take advantage of the ability to seek out and find target tumor cells, and then also differentiate between normal healthy cells expressing similar antigens.”

While autologous T-cell therapies have shown success in treating hematological cancers, they continue to have several important drawbacks. Senti Biosciences is attempting to overcome these drawbacks with the development of natural killer (NK) cell therapies and allogeneic approaches.

CGTLive spoke with Marty Giedlin, PhD, Senior vice president, Technical Operations, Senti Biosciences, at the 7th Annual CAR-TCR Summit 2022, September 19-22 in Boston, Massachusetts, about Senti Biosciences’ pipeline and the future of cell therapy.

Giedlin discussed the advantages of the NK cell platform, mentioning the lack of graft versus host disease and cytokine release syndrome occurring due to adoptive transfers. In his view, NK cells are also especially well-suited to the logic-gating platform that Senti Biosciences is developing to help specifically target tumor cells and differentiate them from healthy cells. In terms of the allogeneic approach, Giedlin mentioned the advantage of being able to provide treatment to a variety of patients through a single process, and highlighted the importance of being able to generate enough doses for many patients. He also discussed automation and analytics in manufacturing and delivery, which he sees as an exciting area for further development in the cell therapy field.