Sotio licences Unum Therapeutics’ CAR-T cell portfolio

Under the deal, SOTIO (Prague) will pay of $11.5m in total  and will will establish a T cell therapy R&D Center of Excellence in Cambridge led by Unum Therapeutics’ former CTO Geoff Hodge. The company said it expects the lead project of next generation T cell therapies to achieve clinical maturity next year. SOTIO will pay US$8.1m upfront. Unum is eglible to receive up to US$3.4m in milestones.

Using the BOXR platform, SOTIO hopes to treat solid tumours by means of next generation CAR-T cell therapies. Unum Therapeutics’ Bolt-on Chimeric Receptor technology incorporates novel transgenes to enhance T cell function in the tumour microenvironment.

SOTIO will build on Unum’s R&D data, its team and a portion of its laboratory and manufacturing facility to create an R&D Center of Excellence for T cell therapies in Cambridge. The plan is to develop multiple enhanced Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-T cell therapies, there, for the treatment of solid tumours.

In preclinical studies, BOXR1030 T cells expressing a GPC3 CAR and a Bolt-on gene were resistant to suppressive tumour microenvironment-like conditions, showing improved T cell proliferation under both hypoxic and low glucose conditions and superior efficacy in comparison to classical GPC3-targeted CAR-T cells. Tumour infiltrating lymphocytes isolated from the tumours of treated animals revealed that BOXR1030 cells were more resistant to dysfunction and had fewer markers of exhaustion as compared to the control CAR-T cells.

SOTIO will leverage its broad cell therapy expertise, including its in-house GMP cell therapy manufacturing site in Prague, to streamline process development and clinical grade cell therapy manufacturing by collaborating closely with the BOXR team in Cambridge.