Cellectis Group announces groundbreaking in vivo proof of concept testing of their flagship UCART19 product for curative therapy of leukemia

Paris, July 4, 2013 - Cellectis (Alternext: ALCLS), the genome engineering specialist, announced today the successful in vivo proof of concept testing of their flagship UCART19 product for curative therapy of leukemia.

UCART19 is a revolutionary engineered T-cell product that leverages Cellectis’ core technologies in genome engineering. This standardized “off-the-shelf” therapy product is designed with a “chimeric antigen receptor” (CAR) to target and kill the most common types of acute and chronic leukemia and are engineered with Cellectis’ nucleases enabling the use of non-patient derived (allogeneic) T-cells. The results obtained show that the UCART19 product was able to eradicate human leukemia cells that had been transferred into mice, effectively curing the mice of tumors, and that the engineered T-cells performed as well as traditional CAR T-cells.  

“These results are a crucial proof of concept for our engineered T-cell product strategy”, stated Andrew M. Scharenberg M.D., Cellectis therapeutics Chief Scientific Officer.  “They validate our platform’s ability to mass produce T-cells that can be used to target any type of cancer”.  

“We believe that our recent advances in the development of our allogenic CAR T-cell platform will hopefully position Cellectis as a major player in this new emerging approach to treating cancer” said Mathieu Simon M.D., Chief Executive Officer of Cellectis therapeutics.

The results announced today arise from collaboration with a University College London (UCL) multi-disciplinary research team led by Dr. Martin Pule, Dr. Karl Peggs and Prof. David Linch.  Dr. Pule states “These results are an important step towards an ‘off-the-shelf’ immune therapy for acute and chronic leukemia.”