PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Regulatory News:
Cellectis (Alternext: ALCLS), the genome engineering specialist, announces today the signing of a broad collaboration agreement with the University College of London (UCL) on the development of a therapy program to fight leukemia.
This agreement builds on Cellectis’ therapeutic strategy to treat patients with B-cell leukemias. This therapy uses Cellectis’ proprietary genome engineering technologies to manufacture T-cells that specifically target and destroy cancer cells. These non-patient derived (allogeneic) T-cells are engineered with Cellectis’ nucleases in order to eliminate the potential for the T-cells to attack the recipient's normal tissues, and to make them resistant to widely used anti-cancer treatments.
The use of Cellectis’ engineered allogeneic T-cells will overcome limitations of patient-derived adoptive immunotherapies by allowing the treatment of a large number of cancer patients with a standardized “off the shelf” therapy product.
Through this agreement, Dr. Martin Pule, Dr. Karl Peggs, and other members of the UCL department of hematology, who are global leaders in adoptive immunotherapy, will work with Cellectis towards in vivo proof of concept and clinical translation of this strategy.
“We believe that our approach to treat cancer represents the next generation of products in oncology. Nuclease based genome engineering technologies are the game changers of cell therapies by turning them from bespoke patient-specific procedures, to more widely available pharmaceutical products” said André Choulika, Chairman and CEO of Cellectis. “This agreement with the UCL cell therapy group, global leaders in adoptive immunotherapy, puts our collaborative group in a leadership position in moving these therapies forward to wide application in the clinic.”
About the UCL department of hematology
The UCL department of hematology is the major tertiary referral center in the UK for all types of hematological malignancies. They have assumed a global leadership position in stem cell transplantation and autologous adoptive cell therapy for leukemia patients.
Dr. Martin Pule as well as being a senior Lecturer in UCL, holds an honorary consultant post as a clinical hematologist in the UCL Hospital (UCLH) and runs a laboratory research program in chimeric antigen receptor design and adoptive immunotherapy.
Dr. Pule started developing chimeric antigen receptors in 2001 at Baylor College of Medicine, with his work culminating in a clinical study in children with a solid cancer called neuroblastoma. This was the first demonstration of clinical efficacy of this approach and was published in Nature Medicine. He is also the principal investigator in an open clinical study in adoptive immunotherapy in UCLH.
Dr. Karl Peggs is a Reader in Stem Cell Transplantation and Immunotherapy at UCL and Honorary Consultant in Hematology/Transplantation at UCL Hospitals. He received his preclinical training and MA at Cambridge University, completing his clinical training at Oxford University Medical School. Following qualification he completed general medical training at Addenbrookes Hospital Cambridge, and specialist hematology training at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and subsequently UCLH, London. During this time he spent three years in the research group of Professor Stephen Mackinnon, establishing adoptive cellular therapies for cytomegalovirus. After taking the position of Senior Lecturer at UCL in 2003, he spent 2 years at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute, New York, in the laboratory of Professor James Allison, studying murine models of regulatory checkpoint blockade.
His research interests include immune reconstitution, pathogen-specific adoptive cellular therapies, and regulatory checkpoint-directed immunotherapeutics. He is member of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Research Clinical Trials Committee, a Trustee of the Teens Unite charity, and has contributed to several international working parties on infectious complications and relapse following stem cell transplantation. He is Chief Investigator for 4 UKCRN national studies investigating transplantation in Hodgkin Lymphoma and cellular therapies for cytomegalovirus.
About Cellectis
Founded in France in 1999, the Cellectis Group is based on highly specific DNA engineering technologies. Its application sectors are human health, agriculture and bio-energies. Co-created by André Choulika, its Chief Executive Officer, Cellectis is today one of the world leading companies in the field of genome engineering. The Group has a workforce of 230 employees working on 5 sites worldwide: Paris & Evry in France, Gothenburg in Sweden, St Paul (Minnesota) & Cambridge (Massachusetts) in the United States. Cellectis achieved revenues of €16M in 2011 and has since its inception has signed more than 80 industrial agreements with pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and biotechnology companies. AFM, DuPont, BASF, Bayer, Total, Limagrain, and Novo Nordisk are some of the Group’s clients and partners. Since 2007, Cellectis has been listed on NYSE-Euronext Alternext market (code: ALCLS) in Paris. For more information, visit our website: www.cellectis.com
Disclaimer
This press release and the information contained herein do not constitute an offer to sell or subscribe, or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe, for shares in Cellectis in any country. This press release contains forward-looking statements that relate to the Company’s objectives based on the current expectations and assumptions of the Company’s management only and involve risk and uncertainties that could cause the Company to fail to achieve the objectives expressed by the forward-looking statements above.