Australian listed biotech company Prescient Therapeutics (ASX: PTX) is forging a path for other prospective cancer treatments, by developing a platform to improve the performance of CAR T drugs.

And by focusing on the “targets and tools” CAR-T treatments rely on, Prescient CEO Steven Yatomi-Clarke said the company stands to benefit regardless of who wins the race to develop these life-saving drugs.

“We believe the people in the gold rush who make the money are those who sell the shovels,” he told Dr Nigel Finch in a recent webinar for Stockhead.

In this instance, Mr Yatomi-Clarke sought to work with industry leaders to create tools future generations of CAR T therapies can utilise to more effectively handle the challenges currently holding the sector back.

“[We looked to partner with] people who had the tools to really alleviate the bottlenecks that are presenting themselves early on in this amazing field, and that led us to the University of Pennsylvania, who pioneered CAR T.,’ he said.

“We have subsequently announced the arrival of OmniCAR, which is a next generation platform.”

CAR T therapies work by taking blood from a cancer patient and retraining their own immune cells to identify and fight cancerous cells, and while it has yielded positive results in certain cancers, this radical treatment comes with a number of challenges.

Specifically, current generation CAR T cells have limited ability to attack multiple targets on tumors at once, for doctors to fine-tune dosages to avoid them reaching toxic levels, or for the cells to be modified in response to mutating tumors.

Prescient’s OmniCAR platform addresses these challenges.

You can hear Mr Yatomi-Clarke’s discussion with Stockhead’s Dr Nigel Finch from 9 February below.

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Sources:

• National Cancer Institute, CAR T Cells: Engineering Patients’ Immune Cells to Treat Their Cancers
• Prescient Therapeutics, Technology
• Stockhead, CAR T cell therapy is driving better cancer treatment outcomes
• Switzer Financial Group, Steven Yatomi-Clarke from Prescient Therapeutics (ASX:PTX) | Switzer Small and Micro Cap Day