Fate, Sloan Kettering expand license pact

Fate Therapeutics announced the company has gained access to additional intellectual property from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center that enables the development of gene-edited T-cell immunotherapies. The newly-licensed portfolio of intellectual property covers new chimeric antigen receptor constructs as well as off-the-shelf CAR T cells, including the use of CRISPR and other innovative technologies for their production. Fate Therapeutics is utilizing gene editing under its ongoing collaboration for the research and development of off-the-shelf CAR T-cell immunotherapies with Michel Sadelain, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Center for Cell Engineering and the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair at MSK. At the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Annual Meeting, Dr. Sadelain will present preclinical data on FT819, an off-the-shelf, TCR-less, CD19 CAR T-cell product manufactured from a clonal master induced pluripotent stem cell line. The use of clonal master iPSC lines can overcome the complexity, heterogeneity and substantial costs associated with using cells from a patient or an allogeneic donor. Instead, iPSC-derived T-cell immunotherapies can be consistently and repeatedly mass produced and delivered in an off-the-shelf manner, significantly reducing the cost of, and time to, patient treatment. Fate Therapeutics has exclusively licensed from MSK intellectual property covering the production and composition of iPSC-derived T cells for human therapeutic use. In addition, Fate Therapeutics owns an extensive intellectual property portfolio that broadly covers compositions and methods for the genome editing of iPSCs using CRISPR and other nucleases, including the use of CRISPR to insert a CAR in the TRAC locus for endogenous transcriptional control

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