On February 27, 2020 Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: SRNE, "Sorrento"), reported that Dr. Henry Ji, Chairman and CEO, will present at the 9th Annual LEERINK Partners Global Healthcare Conference (Lotte New York Palace Hotel, New York) on Thursday Feb 27 at 11:00-11:25 AM (Presentation Room Adams) (Press release, Sorrento Therapeutics, FEB 27, 2020, View Source [SID1234554870]).

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Key updates:

Both RTX Phase 1b Cancer Pain and Phase 1b Osteoarthritis (OA) Knee Pain studies have completed initial enrollment with preliminary positive results: no dose limiting toxicities observed and significant efficacy signal confirmed.
Allogeneic "Off-the-Shelf" Dimeric Antigen Receptor-T (DAR-T) cell therapy products targeting hematologic cancer targets (BCMA, CD38, CD20, CD123) and solid tumor targets (GD2, CEA, EGFR, and many others) have been successfully produced.
Proprietary DAR construct for coronavirus targeting, including COVID-19, has been successfully generated; COVID-19 targeting DAR-T cells and DAR-NK cells will be produced next in Sorrento’s cGMP facilities (San Diego) as part of the IND-enabling package necessary to promptly initiate human clinical studies.
DAR-T specific developments:

Sorrento’s proprietary DAR structure offers potential advantages over the conventional CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) structure by:

increasing specificity and functionality of the DAR-T cells as compared to CAR-T cells due to higher inherent stability of the Fab fragment used in the DAR
potentially reducing the clinical dose due to increased functional activity (preclinical data)
In addition to the proprietary DAR structure, Sorrento’s proprietary non-viral knockout-knockin (KOKI) manufacturing approach offers several potential benefits over virus-based transduction currently used for CAR-T therapies:

site-specific integration of transgenes into pre-selected loci in the T cell genome
enhanced clonal expansion of the DAR-T cells
streamlined method for transgene construct production without the need for laborious and time-consuming virus production, release and validation processes, resulting in a shorter research and development timelines for IND-enabling activities.
Combining those approaches, the allogeneic DAR-T products could potentially have the following major advantages over current autologous CAR-T therapy technologies:

off-the-shelf availability allowing for immediate patient access to allogeneic cell therapies (by using healthy donor cells instead of modifying a patients’ own cells)
significantly improved cost of goods (by making much greater patient-doses in each manufacturing run)
easier execution of global trials and international market access due to established shipping logistics and distribution processes (drug like product)
Beyond targeting cancer related indications, which is the primary focus of Sorrento’s immuno-oncology business, Sorrento believes it can apply its KOKI DAR-T platform against pandemic infectious pathogens, including but not limited to coronaviruses, HBV, HIV, malaria, measles and fungi.

The potential spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus from Wuhan, China is only one example of how quickly a local infection can become a pandemic. Sorrento’s agile KOKI DAR-T and DAR-NK cell therapy platforms, coupled with in-house cGMP manufacturing facilities, should allow for emergency adoptive T cell and innate NK cell therapies being produced rapidly for clinical testing.

COVID_DAR_001 has been added to the Sorrento development pipeline and allocated internal priority both to demonstrate the maturity, agility and development readiness of the proprietary platform and to address an emergency and potentially critical patient need in the upcoming months.