Caribou Biosciences Announces Dosing of First Patient in Phase 1 Clinical Trial Evaluating CB-010, a CRISPR-Edited Allogeneic Anti-CD19 CAR-T Cell Therapy
Current TAP Partner
BERKELEY, CA – July 12, 2021 – Caribou Biosciences, Inc., a leading clinical-stage CRISPR genome-editing biopharmaceutical company, announced today that the first patient has been dosed in its open-label, multicenter ANTLER phase 1 clinical trial (NCT04637763) to evaluate the company’s lead product candidate, CB-010, in patients with relapsed or refractory B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (r/r B-NHL). CB-010 is an allogeneic anti-CD19 CAR-T cell therapy derived from healthy donor T cells that have been engineered using Caribou’s chRDNA technology to reduce the risk of graft versus host disease (GvHD) and knock out PD-1 to boost the persistence of CAR-T cell antitumor activity.
“Advancing our first allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy into the clinic represents a major milestone for Caribou,” said Rachel Haurwitz, Ph.D., Caribou’s president and chief executive officer. “Using our proprietary chRDNA CRISPR technology, we have developed a pipeline of off-the-shelf CAR-T and CAR-NK cell therapies with the potential to serve a greater number of patients than autologous approaches. We believe that improving cell persistence is the key to unlocking the full potential of these therapies. Using our technologies, we edit the genome of healthy donor-derived T cells to enable highly specific and efficient insertion or deletion of genes at multiple sites. This allows us to create sophisticated allogeneic cell therapies with enhanced characteristics to potentially improve their effectiveness and durability of antitumor activity compared to other allogeneic cell therapies. With CB-010, we are evaluating the potential persistence-enhancing effects of removing the PD-1 protein from the surface of these CD19-targeted CAR-T cells.”
Cherry Thomas, M.D., senior vice president of clinical development, added, “We are thrilled to advance CB-010 in the clinic and believe it potentially represents a promising, differentiated therapy for patients. Initially, we will evaluate escalating doses of CB-010 in relapsed or refractory B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients with the goals of assessing safety and tolerability and to establish a dose level for the expansion phase of the study. We look forward to having initial clinical data from this clinical trial in 2022.”