Cell-based Immune-oncology therapies continue to deliver amazing results. After Cellectis wondersaving from last week, Oxford’s Adaptimmune has some surprisingly good results too.
Adaptimmune is a British, Oxford-based immuno-oncolgy company. It held a massive IPO last year, raising up to €150M on the NASDAQ, and its CEO was interviewed by BIO (video here) where he seemed very confident about the future of its TCR technology. This technology, close to CAR-T, strengthens the patients own T-cell response to target and destroy cancer cells (a more in-depth explanation of these different cancer treatments can be found in our Oncology review).
He can be confident so far by looking at the trial results recently released in New York.
Adaptimmune’s lead program is investigating NY-ESO-1 for synovial sarcoma, the study for which included 12 patients, all in a late-stage of cancer. All the patients had either synovial sarcoma which was metastatic or inoperable relapse and failed to respond to chemotherapy. These patients are usually very hard to treat and have few options left.
But TCR immunotherapy (and CAR-T) aren’t just any types of cancer-fighting technique…
Indeed, the study shows that 50 percent of the patients responded to the treatments, with 75% remaining alive and on a long-term follow-up study. The trial also demonstrated how Adaptimmune’s TCR shows better responses rate than expected for autologous stem cell transplants alone.
Adaptimmune’s Chief Medical Officer stated:
“We are encouraged by the response and survival data we are observing in patients with chemotherapy refractory synovial sarcoma”.
This program is developed in partnership with GSK in a massive 350 million dollar ($) deal.
This a really good news for Adaptimmune and GSK. The development of this new generation of therapies, along the way with CAR-T, is moving forward extremely rapidly and such good results are again more than encouraging.
It is therefore not surprising that half of BIO-Europe 2015 was so buzzed by the immuno-oncology news.