On December 4, 2017 OncoTracker, Inc., a private medical diagnostics company, reported 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 (Press release, OncoTracker, DEC 4, 2017, View Source [SID1234553990]).
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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."
"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."
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) (Free SITC Whitepaper). November 8-12, 2017. National Harbor, MD.