ImmunoCellular Therapeutics, Ltd. ("ImmunoCellular") (NYSE MKT: IMUC) announced today that it has established a licensing agreement with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for exclusive rights to novel technology for the development of certain antigen specific T-cell immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer. The technology originated from the labs of David Baltimore, PhD, Nobel Laureate and President Emeritus, and Robert Andrews, Millikan Professor of Biology at Caltech, and utilizes the patient's own hematopoietic stem cells to create antigen-specific killer T-cells to treat cancer. ImmunoCellular plans to utilize this technology to expand and complement its dendritic cell-based cancer vaccine platform, with the goal of developing new immunotherapies that kill cancer cells in a highly directed and specific way, and that can function as single agents or in combination approaches.
Caltech's technology addresses the challenge, and limitation, that CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) and TCR (T-cell receptor) technologies have faced of generating a limited, short-lived immune response. By putting T-cell receptors into stem cells rather than into T-cells, the immune response can be transformed into a long-lived and potent response that could effectively treat previously resilient solid cancers. This observation has been verified in animal models by investigators at Caltech and the National Cancer Institute.
"The Baltimore et al. novel approach to generating antigen-specific T-cells for cancer therapy has potential advantages over other T-cell therapeutic approaches. Our goal is to generate a first clinical candidate from this new discovery platform, and expand our existing dendritic cell expertise into the adjacent fields of stem cells and T-cells," said Andrew Gengos, ImmunoCellular Chief Executive Officer. "By adding this new platform technology to ImmunoCellular's dendritic cell-based platform, we believe we can add significant value to our Company and move toward reaching our goal of building a leading cancer immunotherapy company based on multiple approaches to immune system stimulation."
Financial terms of the licensing agreement are not being disclosed.
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