Morphogenesis — Florida-based immunotherapy company — and the Cell and Gene Therapy Group at Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Sweden have announced a collaboration for the development of targeted immunotherapies to treat cancer.
Cancer cell
The two-and-a-half-year collaboration will combine Morphogenesis’ gene therapy with the exosome-mediated delivery technology developed by the KI Department of Medicine.
Dr Evren Alici, the KI lead, will use Morphogenesis’ proprietary gene therapy to develop injectable next generation exosome-mediated in vivo cancer therapies. “Exosomes are small vesicles secreted by nearly all cells. Increasingly, exosomes are being recognised as potential therapeutics because they play an important role in intercellular communication,” he explained.
Initially, the project will be focused on the treatment of multiple myeloma, which is a type of blood cancer that affects plasma cells.
“This collaboration brings together two amazing technology platforms that could open up a non-invasive, non-toxic and targeted approach for treating hard to access tumours,” remarked Patricia Lawman, Morphogenesis CEO. “If we’re successful, this new type of immunotherapy will have far reaching implications beyond myeloma, meaning we can treat virtually any type of cancer by generating a patient-specific vaccine right in the patient.”
“We are excited to develop and test a novel therapeutic approach for patients with multiple myeloma in collaboration with Morphogenesis,” added Alici. “We believe that the data generated by this collaboration will help us elucidate promising but previously untested strategies to overcome immune evasion by malignant myeloma cells.”