Los Angeles, CA – December 4, 2017 — OncoTracker, Inc., a private medical diagnostics company, announced a license agreement with Juno Therapeutics (NASDAQ: JUNO), a biopharmaceutical company developing innovative cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, to advance its program in multiple myeloma using gamma secretase inhibitors (GSIs) in combination with BCMA-directed CAR T cells.
Through its agreement with OncoTracker, Juno will gain exclusive rights to intellectual property within the field of combinations of GSIs and BCMA-directed engineered T cells.
James R. Berenson, M.D., President and CSO of OncoTracker stated, “In the past 12 months, we have made significant advances in personalizing treatment for multiple myeloma patients utilizing our proprietary sBCMA diagnostic test. Our test has broad ranging applications, including clinical trial monitoring, companion diagnostic testing, and most importantly, clinical practice testing and monitoring. We believe that our simple, proprietary blood test can accurately and rapidly assess benefit of ongoing treatments, can accurately predict both PFS and OS, and can identify patients that require immediate treatment vs. wait and watch categories.â€
“BCMA appears to be an important target for treating patients with multiple myeloma, and Juno is dedicated to investigating novel approaches to maximize efficacy for these patients. These licenses open up an important approach to improve the activity and outcomes for CAR T cells targeted at BCMA,†said Sunil Agarwal, M.D., Juno’s President of Research and Development. “We plan to combine gamma secretase inhibitors with our BCMA CAR T product candidates, initially testing combinations in 2018.â€
1Pont M. “Gamma secretase inhibition increases recognition of multiple myeloma by BCMA-specific chimeric antigen receptor modified T cells.†Presented at Annual Meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC). November 8-12, 2017. National Harbor, MD.
About OncoTracker
OncoTracker, Inc. (“OncoTrackerâ€) is a West Hollywood-based oncology company with exclusive rights to a novel blood biomarker that is the target of several multiple myeloma therapies in clinical development. We utilize this biomarker to monitor the tumor burden and predict the therapeutic outcome of multiple myeloma patients. In addition, we believe this biomarker has clinical relevancy in chronic lymphocytic leukemia, B-cell lymphoma and potentially other solid cancers. OncoTracker further possess intellectual property related to two multiple myeloma therapies, one of which is in clinical trials.
About Juno
Juno Therapeutics, Inc. is building a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company focused on developing innovative cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer. Founded on the vision that the use of human cells as therapeutic entities will drive one of the next important phases in medicine, Juno is developing cell-based cancer immunotherapies based on chimeric antigen receptor and high-affinity T cell receptor technologies to genetically engineer T cells to recognize and kill cancer. Juno is developing multiple cell-based product candidates to treat a variety of B-cell malignancies as well as multiple solid tumors and multiple myeloma. Several product candidates have shown compelling clinical responses in clinical trials in refractory leukemia and lymphoma conducted to date. Juno’s long-term aim is to leverage its cell-based platform to develop new product candidates that address a broader range of cancers and human diseases. Juno brings together innovative technologies from some of the world’s leading research institutions, including the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Seattle Children’s Research Institute (SCRI), the University of California, San Francisco, and The National Cancer Institute. Juno Therapeutics has an exclusive license to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital patented technology for CD19-directed product candidates that use 4-1BB, which was developed by Dario Campana, Chihaya Imai, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Juno’s product candidate JCAR017 was developed in collaboration with SCRI and others.
Juno provided the “About Juno Therapeutics, Inc.â€Â sections of this press release. OncoTracker disclaims all responsibility for the accuracy of the content of those sections and the websites or other Internet content referenced therein.
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