Australian biotech company Prescient Therapeutics has publicly revealed its high-performing cell therapy enhancement platform named CellPryme-M, developed in collaboration with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.

The new platform was developed to improve the effectiveness of CAR-T therapies, which use genetically modified cells taken from patients’ own immune systems to battle diseases that otherwise could not be treated, including various types of cancers.

CellPryme-M can be used by cell therapy drug manufacturers to produce better cells that do not exhaust as readily as current cell therapies – allowing for longer periods of cancer killing – and exhibit better tumour trafficking and penetrative abilities when compared with current-generation cell therapies.

CellPryme-M is now ready for use in clinical studies and the company plans to use the platform to enhance the cells used in its existing breakthrough OmniCAR programs.

Opens the door for third parties

Because CellPryme-M platform is a complementary tool for enhancing cell therapies, it can be ‘dropped in’ to third-party manufacturing processes rather than needing to be used as a building block in the early stages of drug development.

Prescient’s senior VP of scientific affairs Dr Rebecca Lim said: “This GMP-grade

product can be easily incorporated into any CAR-T manufacturing program to significantly boost the cancer-killing ability of T cells by skewing their phenotype to a less differentiated state.

“I can see enormous potential for CellPryme-M to benefit those third-party CAR-T programs that have struggled with getting good persistence and tumour penetrance with their CAR-T cells.” 

Prescient (ASX: PTX) said this platform will not only improve the performance of drugs developed with the company’s own OmniCAR cell therapy platform, but can also enhance other types of cell therapy.

Prescient CEO Steven Yatomi Clarke said the new platform “opens up an entirely new business opportunity” for the company to licence CellPryme-M to other cell therapy manufacturers. 

“It requires minimal intervention into existing and emerging manufacturing process and therefore  represents a relatively low implementation hurdle. This opens up real commercial opportunities for Prescient to incorporate CellPryme-M into third-party manufacturing processes,” he said.

“However, in a real show of confidence, Prescient will be its own first customer by using it to enhance its internal OmniCAR programs, to combine next-gen CAR-T capabilities with superior cell phenotypes.”

Coming to fruition

CellPryme-M has been in development for 18 months, as part of Prescient’s ongoing partnership with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, however until this week the program has remained in ‘stealth mode’ while the technology was being developed for commercial and intellectual property reasons.

The company has alluded to the program and others still under wraps in the past, noting in its December quarter results it was developing a number of “highly promising” projects with “potential to add significant value for the business and clinicians worldwide”. 

In its March quarterly, Prescient added that “substantial progress” had been made on its furtive cell therapy enhancement project, but explained commercial sensitivities meant no further detail could be released at the time.

Prescient Therapeutics CEO Steven Yatomi-Clarke and Senior VP of Scientific Affairs Dr Rebecca Lim will be hosting a live and interactive investor briefing on Friday, 10th June, at 12.30pm (AEST) to discuss Prescient’s new cell enhancement therapy CellPryme-M in more detail. Click here to register.

Reach Markets have been engaged by PTX to assist with their investor communications.

Sources:

• Prescient Therapeutics ASX Announcements, December 2021 Quarterly Update
• Prescient Therapeutics ASX Announcements, March 2022 Quarterly Update