Lonza and Leucid Bio have inked a collaboration deal that will see the Swiss CDMO giant responsible for manufacturing CAR-T therapies for the London biotech’s upcoming phase 1 clinical trial of an ovarian cancer treatment.
Under the agreement, Leucid will use Lonza’s Cocoon Platform to produce high-quality cells it hopes can be achieved in a faster and more cost-effective process. With autologous CAR-T cell therapy, a patient’s own immune cells are reprogrammed so they can identify and destroy cancer cells.
Financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.
“This collaboration aims to illustrate the promise and feasibility of manufacturing autologous immunotherapies in a decentralized model into approved routine use,” Nicholas Ostrout, Lonza’s head of commercial development for personalized medicine, said in a statement.
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Leucid’s approach is to arrange the co-stimulatory domains in parallel by taking a second-generation CAR-T with a single co-stimulatory domain and adding a second chimeric receptor with its own co-stimulatory module.
The upcoming trial is for Leucid’s LEU-011, a NKG2D CAR T-cell therapy for patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. Others, including Celyad, are also targeting NKG2D because of the overexpression of its ligand in a wide range of cancers and its role in immune responses.