A Universal Killer T-cell for Adoptive Cell Therapy of Cancer

Immunotherapy is considered the future of cancer therapy. T-cell based cancer immunotherapy has the recent years received massive interest from the pharma- and biotech industry, investors, media and patients. This interest is due to astonishing results from clinical trials where patients with incurable cancers were cured. At the same time, a new class of cancer drugs - checkpoint inhibitors - has also demonstrated great clinical effect in several cancer types. Together, these new treatment modalities show the enormous potential in using T-cells to fight cancer. Unfortunately, T-cell based therapy currently relies on using the patients own T-cells to produce the cellular "drug". This process is very expensive, time consuming and requires specialized facilities only a few hospitals have. As a consequence, this is currently a therapy available only to a very small number of patients. Our project aims to change this, and turn T-cell based therapy into off-the-shelf products. Our product, Universal Killer cells (UK-92), can be used instead of the patients T-cells and can be produced and stocked in large amounts upfront. This dramatically reduces production time and costs and turns T-cell based therapy into off-the-shelf products available to a much larger patient population.

The use of the immune system to fight cancer, immunotherapy, has received a tremendous amount of attention recently due to clinical trials where patients with advanced deadly cancer types have actually been cured. One form of immunotherapy utilizes the patients? own T cells that are engineered to express cancer-targeting receptors such as chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) or T cell receptors (TCRs) to fight cancer in a process termed adoptive cell therapy (ACT). The recent few years, several big pharma and biotech companies have invested heavily in this field which is regarded as the future of cancer therapy. A currently unresolved critical issue with this therapy is that it is highly personal and is custom made for each individual patient using the patients own T-cells. This dramatically limits the number of patients that can receive the treatment due to high cost and low production capacity. Our invention was made to solve this critical issue. We have developed a Universal Killer T-Cell (UK-92) that is used instead of the patients own T-cell and removes the personal aspect of T-cell therapy. The UK-92 cells are non-immunogenic and can be used across patients without the risk of rejection by the host immune system. Furthermore, the UK-92 cells can express virtually any TCR to target any cancer and has the killing capability of normal T-cells. This project aims at finalizing the pre-clinical development of the UK-92 and we will be ready to test the concept on the first patient at the end of the project. We aim to establish a Norwegian biotech company that will develop and produce UK-92 based therapies for the treatment of deadly cancers that has no treatment options. The results produced in this project will serve as a basis for attracting funding and investors to establish the company and initiate a clinical phase I/IIa trial.