Shinobi and Anocca to advance cancer killing iPS-T cell therapies

Under the terms of the agreement, Shinobi will combine its iPS-T cell platform with Anocca’s TCR discovery platform to create a new class of TCR-iPS-Ts.

“Anocca’s platform allows the scale-out of TCR-T development and delivers libraries of clinical candidate TCRs that span multiple solid tumor cancer targets across broad patient segments,” Reagan Jarvis, CEO of Anocca told BioProcess Insider.

“By combining Anocca TCRs with the Shinobi Katana platform, we envision a rapid, efficient, novel and transformative product manufacture modality. Under this antigenic targets on a patient’s tumor are matched with Anocca’s TCR library and introduced in a ‘plug-and-play' manner into clinic-ready Shinobi iPS-T-cells. We anticipate delivering initial validatory data within the first year of the partnership and this will form the springboard for further validation and product development over the coming years.”

Anocca TCR platform is designed to recreate human T-cell biology in the lab to precisely map T-cell targets and identify highly specific and potent TCRs. The platform uses advanced tests with programmable human cells to carefully analyze and find real disease targets and the specific T-cell receptors that recognize them, according to the company.

Meanwhile, Shinobi’s Katana platform is said to enable rapid pipeline creation by driving iPS-T cell differentiation without defining antigen specificity. This allows the development of an immune evasive CD8ab iPS-T cell platform that can then be armed with any receptor. CD8ab iPS-T cells are critical class I-restricted T cells responsible for killing cancerous or virally infected cells and mediating adaptive immunity.

“Our Katana technology allows us to have a fully engineered CD8ab iPS-T cell which can then be modified to efficiently introduce a CAR or TCR in a plug-and-play manner,” Dan Kemp, CEO of Shinobi told us.

“Key challenges in the development of off-the-shelf TCR-iPS-T cell therapies are production and robustness of the process to differentiate the cell phenotype and the ability to produce cells at scale. From Anocca’s perspective, we have been impressed by the Shinobi platform and its potential to deliver against these criteria. Our partnership is aimed at addressing these key challenges in a stepwise manner.”

The financials of this partnership have not been disclosed.