Sense, Compute, and Respond: Designing Intelligent Cell and Gene Therapies

"What we're really trying to do here at Senti Bio is enable smarter cell or gene therapies...that can detect where diseases happen in the body, make a decision, and effectively treat the disease." —Tim Lu, CEO and co-founder, Senti Bio

The lack of specificity is a key challenge with the current treatment landscape in oncology. Senti Bio is hoping to change that with its gene circuit technology.

Tim Lu, MD, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Senti Bio, joined CGTL to discuss his company's approach to creating "smarter" therapies by developing these gene circuits that equip chimeric antigen receptor natural killer (CAR-NK) cells with multiple cytokines to improve the cytotoxicity and persistence of its CAR-NK cell product candidates.

"What we're really trying to do here at Senti Bio is enable smarter cell or gene therapies...that can detect where diseases happen in the body, make a decision, and effectively treat the disease," Lu said.

In addition to its gene circuit technology platform, Senti Bio also has a number of clinical programs in development. SENTI-202 is a logic gated allogeneic CAR-NK cell therapy for the potential treatment of acute myeloid leukemia, SENTI-301 is a multi-armed allogeneic CAR-NK cell therapy for the potential treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma, and SENTI-401 is another logic gated allogenic CAR-NK therapy for the potential treatment of colorectal cancer.

Senti has also formed partnerships and collaborations with other companies, such as Spark Therapeutics,¹ in order to design artificial promoters that function inside adeno-associated virus gene therapy.

"We think the cell and gene therapy space is super exciting and [will] continue to move forward," Lu said. "Essentially, how we view the field today is we have a lot of new modalities and approaches that are being tested, but I think [with] all of these approaches, people are going to want greater control, greater addition of additional mechanisms of action to improve efficacy, as well as greater safety, and that's really where more sophisticated genetic engineering will come in."

Reference:

Spark Therapeutics Enters Collaboration with Senti Bio to Bolster Industry-Leading Gene Therapy Research Platform. News release. Spark Therapeutics. April 13, 2021. https://sparktx.com/press_releases/senti-collaboration/