Oxford Biomedica, gene and cell therapy group and PhoreMost, the UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing drugs against intractable disease targets, have entered into a discovery collaboration to develop next-generation CAR-T cell therapies. Financial details of the agreement are not disclosed.
PhoreMost will deploy its in-house expertise and next-generation phenotypic screening platform, Siteseeker, to identify therapeutic candidates for Oxford Biomedica’s LentiVectorgene therapy delivery system. The programme will initially focus on CAR-T therapy and aims to develop next-generation cell therapies with significantly improved efficacy and durability.
John Dawson, CEO of Oxford Biomedica, said: “We are excited to apply this next-generation technology to our LentiVector platform. The collaboration has the potential to deliver more effective CAR-T therapies, and we look forward to working closely with the PhoreMost team.”
Dr Chris Torrance, CEO, PhoreMost, said: “This collaboration with Oxford Biomedica, a global pioneer in cell and gene therapies, is further recognition of the power of Siteseeker, offering an exciting opportunity to discover and accelerate the development of clinical stage products. The natural complementarity between Siteseeker and LentiVector offers great promise for this and future collaborations between the two companies.”
Siteseeker exploits protein shape diversity to find functionally active peptides linked to any chosen disease setting, significantly enhancing the power of phenotypic screening and translation into therapeutic modalities. Based on proprietary protein interference, or ‘PROTEINi’, technology, Siteseeker is able to systematically probe the entire proteome in a live cell environment to identify and exploit novel drug targets.
Image credit: Toa Heftiba
