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ImmunoCellular, Caltech enter licensing deal for new antigen-specific T-cell technology

ImmunoCellular Therapeutics has entered into a licensing agreement with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for exclusive rights of new technology to develop certain antigen specific T-cell immunotherapies to treat cancer.

Originated from the labs of David Baltimore, Nobel Laureate and President Emeritus, and Robert Andrews, Millikan Professor of Biology at Caltech, the technology uses the patient’s own hematopoietic stem cells to create antigen-specific killer T-cells to treat cancer.

The company intends to use this technology from Caltech to expand and complement its dendritic cell-based cancer vaccine platform.

Caltech’s technology will be used to develop new immunotherapies that kill cancer cells in a highly directed and specific way, and that can function as single agents or in combination approaches.

According to the company, Caltech’s technology addresses the challenge and limitation, that chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) and T-cell receptor (TCR) technologies have faced of generating a limited, short-lived immune response.

ImmunoCellular chief executive officer Andrew Gengos said the Baltimore et al. novel approach to generating antigen-specific T-cells for cancer therapy has potential advantages over other T-cell therapeutic approaches.

"Our goal is to generate a first clinical candidate from this new discovery platform, and expand our existing dendritic cell expertise into the adjacent fields of stem cells and T-cells," Gengos said.

"By adding this new platform technology to ImmunoCellular’s dendritic cell-based platform, we believe we can add significant value to our Company and move toward reaching our goal of building a leading cancer immunotherapy company based on multiple approaches to immune system stimulation."