TC BioPharm Reports Racing Toward What Could Be A Major Cancer Immunotherapy Breakthrough

This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice.

Angela Scott, godmother to Dolly — the sheep cloned by a group of scientists in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1996 — is turning her decades of genetics and stem cell research toward cancer with her latest venture TC BioPharm.

TC BioPharm TCBP is a clinical-stage cell therapy company with the goal of developing more affordable CAR T therapies so cancer patients everywhere can access the cutting-edge treatment that’s saving lives. Here’s some more background on one of the minds behind TC BioPharm and the approach the company says it is using to make safe, effective and low-cost cell therapies.

CAR T Therapy Helps Retrain Immune System To Detect Cancer 

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy modifies the immune system’s T cells — a type of white blood cell that targets and kills harmful substances in the body — to target cancer cells. The idea behind this novel immunotherapy is to address one of the most challenging aspects of cancer treatments: the fact that the patient’s body can’t easily recognize cancer as a disease that needs to be fought. 

The problem is that cancer cells are not foreign invaders but simply the body’s own cells mutated. Those mutations produce what cancer researchers now call neoantigens — differences in the cancer cell’s protein structure that distinguish it from normal, healthy cells. But the differences are subtle and not easy for T cells to recognize.

So the goal of CAR T-cell therapy is to retrain that immune system to better recognize (and destroy) cancer cells. To do that, manufacturers take T cells from the patient’s blood and genetically modify them in the lab to add a chimeric antigen receptor. 

That receptor is tailored to attach to a specific antigen unique to the cancer the patient is fighting — basically training the T cells to better recognize those subtle differences that they were blind to before.

While this approach has led to some major breakthroughs, especially for hard-to-treat cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, it still suffers from some important limitations.

One limitation is antigen escape. Similar to the way a bacterial infection can become resistant to an antibiotic, cancer can evolve to resist CAR T therapies because they’re manufactured to target a single antigen the cancer can mutate to stop producing. 

Another limitation is tumor infiltration. Penetrating a tumor is not as easy as penetrating blood-born cancer cells. The tumor has a strong physical barrier and other defense mechanisms that make it difficult for the CAR T cells to get inside and get to work.

A third problem is scalability. Right now, CAR T therapies typically need to be developed using the patient’s own cells to prevent the host from rejecting the treatment as a foreign substance. If the immune system flags it as a foreign invader, it can not only limit the therapy’s effects but also trigger harmful side effects similar to when a transplant patient rejects a donor organ. 

TC BioPharm’s Gamma Delta T Cells Could Help Solve CAR T Limitations

Gamma Delta T (GDT) cells don’t detect cancer cells on the basis of a single antigen like other T cells. Instead, they recognize a broad pattern of molecular abnormalities on a cell’s surface. This makes it harder for cancer to develop a resistance to GDT cells because it’s not a matter of just stopping the production of a single antigen.

These cells are also better at penetrating tissue, giving them an advantage over other CAR T therapies in the treatment of solid tumors. 

Finally, they target harmful substances without relying on major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules, the cell surface proteins that help the immune system differentiate between its own cells and foreign cells.

For manufacturers, that means GDT-based treatments don’t need to be developed using the patient’s own cells. Instead, companies like TC BioPharm can use healthy donor cells without as much risk of the patient’s body rejecting the donor-derived treatment as a foreign substance.

The company states it is now developing a range of allogenic cell therapies using these powerful cancer-fighting cells. A single batch of donor cells can be multiplied and processed into large batches of “off-the-shelf” treatments safe for any patient to take. The ability to manufacture at scale may significantly reduce the cost, which could allow TC BioPharm to potentially offer a substantially more affordable cell therapy to cancer patients.

To that end, TC BioPharm partnered with bluebird bio Inc. BLUE in 2017 in an effort to move its pioneering treatments to the patients who need them as quickly as possible by leveraging bluebird’s clinical development expertise to accelerate the research and development process.

Then, in 2018, the company partnered with NIPRO Corp. (TSE: 8086) to receive additional funding for clinical research of its modified gamma delta T cell platform.

Through these partnerships, and the expertise that Scott with her 37 years of experience in oncology research and regenerative medicine, TC BioPharm has built a pipeline of off-the-shelf cancer drug candidates to target solid tumors as well as blood-borne cancers.

Its leading candidate, OmnImmune was just granted orphan drug status by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in March after positive Phase 1b/2a trials demonstrated that the GDT therapy was safe, well-tolerated, and effective at triggering a complete or near-complete response in patients with acute myeloid leukemia. 

This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice.

Image by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash