CancerVax teams with UCLA to develop universal CAR-T platform

CancerVAX will adapt the technology developed for its universal cancer project to create a universal CAR-T platform with the UCLA.

CancerVAX, a pre-clinical biotechnology firm working with a research team from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has expanded its development pipeline to include a universal chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell platform.

Following a recent meeting between company executives and the UCLA research team, CancerVAX said its nanoparticle technology developed for the current universal cancer vaccine project, can be altered to target T-cells, and move genetic instructions to reprogram T-cells into CAR-T cells inside the body.

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Liable to the specific genetic instructions given, different cancers can then be targeted by the new CAR-T cells. In turn, this has resulted the firm to expand its development pipeline to include a “Universal CAR-T Platform.”

The firm referenced the complex and expensive processes currently associated with CAR-T cell therapies and claimed the platform it is developing can potentially reduce the cost of these therapies to a few thousand dollars per dose by assisting the body to create its own CAR-T cells.

“CAR-T cell therapy is one of the more promising immunotherapies entering the mainstream of cancer treatment. There are currently six US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved CAR-T cell therapies, and they all cost around $500,000 per dose,” Ryan Davies, CEO of CancerVAX said.

“While no amount of money is too much to save a single human life, we hope to dramatically lower the cost of CAR-T cell therapy by several orders of magnitude and help save many lives. The extreme low cost of the COVID vaccine, which uses similar technology and concepts, leads us to believe that this major cost reduction is possible with our universal CAR-T cell platform.”