Sorry for the slight delay getting this out. I was trying to account for each patient as even 1 or 2 misplaced will impact the response numbers in these small trials. Took a while.
Our last post focused on the CAR technology coming out of the MSKCC and affiliated institutions, being brought together under the Juno company umbrella. Juno was funded by ARCH Venture Partners and the Alaska Permanent Fund, through a partnership managed by Crestline Investors, along with Bezos Expeditions, and Venrock. We noted in closing that CAR T cell technologies were performing very well in acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), but not as well in the Non-Hodgkin Lymphomas (NHL). In early data sets response rates were not trending very high.
Recently I came across Kite Pharma’s JPM update on their version of CAR therapy. Kite is financed by Pontifax Ltd., Alta Partners, Commercial Street Capital, and individual investors, in partnership with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Surgery Branch under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). This reflects that the technology is coming out of NCI labs.
I was struck again by the duration and response rates reported and the indications they were pursuing. It seems that there is one extra patient in the JPM slide deck, so I went back to the ASH talk to get the right numbers. So lets review. Kite calls its lead CAR construct a very straightforward name: anti-CD19 CAR. Like 19-28z CAR from Juno/MSKCC, this CAR is built with a anti-CD19 scFv, followed by CD28 and CD3 signaling components. Quite unlike the 19-28z effort however, the lead here is NHL indications, specifically as seen here:
