AdAlta has entered a collaboration agreement with Carina Biotech to develop next-generation i-body enabled CAR-T cells, with the potential to bring CAR-T cell therapy to treat a far greater range of cancers than the small number of blood cancers that has been achieved today.
Under the Collaboration Agreement, AdAlta will discover and optimise panels of i-bodies that bind to designated solid tumour antigen targets, from which Carina will generate CAR-T cells and identify optimal CAR-T product candidates including bi-specific CAR-T products. Carina and AdAlta will jointly fund pre-clinical proof of concept studies in mouse tumour models and will jointly own products emerging from the collaboration.
AdAlta (ASX:1AD) and Carina Biotech join forces to develop next-generation CAR-T cancer therapeutics
CAR-T therapy explained
Chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapy is a fast-emerging form of cancer therapy that modifies a patient’s immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells that have resisted standard treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation.
Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) are molecules “targeted” at molecular markers on cancer cells. A patient’s T cells – key cells of the immune system – are engineered to express these molecules on their surface. T cells armed with CARs (CAR-T cells) can more easily “home in” on cancer cells and destroy them.
There are already five approved CAR-T therapies available in the US today. These are generating transformational outcomes for patients with blood cancers that have failed multiple prior lines of therapy. Even with these limited early applications, the market is forecast to grow at 20.2% per year, and to be worth $20.3 billion by 2027.[1] Revenues from solid tumour CAR-T cell therapies are forecast to exceed revenues from blood cancer CAR-T cell therapies by 2030.[2]
[1] Grandview Research, T-cell Therapy Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report 2021 – 2028, Feb 2021
[2] Polaris Market Research, CAR-T Cell Therapy Market Share, Size, Trends, Industry Analysis Report 2021 – 2028, June 2021
CAR-T cell therapy video
To learn more about CAR-T cell therapy, watch the below video from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (posted with permission for educational purposes only).