Keeping Patients at the Center of CAR T-Cell Therapy Development: Jennifer Chow

"Cell therapy has the ability to bring something to cancer patients that we haven't seen before." —Jennifer Chow, CEO, Managing Director, Chimeric Therapeutics

May 2022 marks the 10-year cancer-free anniversary of Emily Whitehead, who was the first pediatric patient to receive CAR T-cell therapy. Fast forward a decade and there has been tons more innovation and headway made in making cell and gene therapy accessible to more patients with cancer. But there is still more work to be done.

Jennifer Chow, chief executive officer and managing director of Chimeric Therapeutics, hopes to contribute to the narrative with a handful of offerings in development across 2 platforms: CORE-NK, which uses allogeneic natural killer cells, and T-cell derived autologous therapies.

Chimeric recently announced phase 1 results from a trial of the CORE-NK platform in patients with blood cancers and solid tumors, where it demonstrated a durable complete response achieved with 15+ month ongoing response in 1 patient with high risk myelodysplastic syndrome, and 100% disease control rate in 3 blood cancer patients at day 28.¹

Also recently, Chimeric published preclinical safety and efficacy data on its CAR T-cell therapy CHM 2101 targeting cell surface marker CDH17. The findings were published in the journal Nature Cancer.²

“CDH17 has been a target that people probably would think to stay away from because we know it’s expressed on healthy tissue. But what [investigators] were able to show is that there was, with CDH17, complete eradication of the tumor cells, but the healthy cells weren’t touched,” Chow told CGTL in an interview. “They were able to show this new class of antigen targets where there is some type of masking of those healthy cells…so they are able to be free from the toxicity of the CAR T cell. This opens up the door to some of these antigen targets.”

References:

Final results from the phase 1 trial of CORE NK platform in blood cancers and solid tumors. News release. Chimeric Therapuetics. March 7, 2022. Accessed April 27, 2022. https://chimerictherapeutics.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Final-Results-in-Phase-1-Trial-of-CORE-NK-Platform.pdf

Feng Z, He X, Zhang X, et al. Potent suppression of neuroendocrine tumors and gastrointestinal cancers by CDH17CAR T cells without toxicity to normal tissues [published online ahead of print, 2022 Mar 21]. Nat Cancer. 2022;10.1038/s43018-022-00344-7. doi:10.1038/s43018-022-00344-7