Cellectis: an innovative anti-cancer approach. The University College of London and Cellectis have signed a collaboration agreement to develop a T-cell adoptive immunotherapy to fight leukemia

Cellectis (Alternext: ALCLS), the genome engineering specialist, announces today the signing of a broad collaboration agreement with the University College of London (UCL) on the development of a therapy program to fight leukemia.

This agreement builds on Cellectis’ therapeutic strategy to treat patients with B-cell leukemias. This therapy uses Cellectis’ proprietary genome engineering technologies to manufacture T-cells that specifically target and destroy cancer cells. These non-patient derived (allogeneic) T-cells are engineered with Cellectis’ nucleases in order to eliminate the potential for the T-cells to attack the recipient's normal tissues, and to make them resistant to widely used anti-cancer treatments.

The use of Cellectis’ engineered allogeneic T-cells will overcome limitations of patient-derived adoptive immunotherapies by allowing the treatment of a large number of cancer patients with a standardized “off the shelf” therapy product.

Through this agreement, Dr. Martin Pule, Dr. Karl Peggs, and other members of the UCL department of hematology, who are global leaders in adoptive immunotherapy, will work with Cellectis towards in vivo proof of concept and clinical translation of this strategy.

“We believe that our approach to treat cancer represents the next generation of products in oncology. Nucease based genome engineering technologies are the game changers of cell therapies by turning them from bespoke patient-specific procedures, to more widely available pharmaceutical products” said André Choulika, Chairman and CEO of Cellectis. “This agreement with the UCL cell therapy group, global leaders in adoptive immunotherapy, puts our collaborative group in a leadership position in moving these therapies forward to wide application in the clinic”.