Alaunos Therapeutics Inc (TCRT)

[jondoeuk]

Well, nothing has been confirmed by the company (a PhI at MD Anderson) and the NCI trial still hasn't started. Meanwhile, others, such as PACT Pharma are not waiting around https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pact-pharma-raises-75m-in-oversubscribed-series-c-financing-to-develop-fully-personalized-neotcr-t-cell-therapies-for-patients-with-cancer-300985029.html

They (PACT) have their own methods of identifying neoantigen-specific T-cells in the blood [1] and use a nonviral (an undisclosed, CRISPR-based approach) which has been translated into a single-step (c)GMP manufacturing process.

The product consist mainly of T-cells of the ''younger'' Tscm [2,3] and Tcm [4] phenotype and are polyfunctional [5]. Also, it contains CD4+ in addition to CD8+ T-cells and we know the former are critical for durable responses [6,7].

Sometime this year they will move to a product that has up to at least four TCRs, their HLA catalog enables analysis for over 99% of the population and clonal neoantigens are prioritised [8].

Refs:
1 https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(19)31022-8
2 https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.4241
3 https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.2446
4 https://www.pnas.org/content/102/27/9571.long
5 https://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/79/13_Supplement/1433
6 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eji.201343718
7 https://www.jimmunol.org/content/174/5/2591
8 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/1463.long