AbbVie and Caribou in CAR-T tie-up

US pharma major AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) and privately-held Caribou Biosciences, a CRISPR genome editing company, have entered into a collaboration and license agreement for the research and development of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapeutics.

It is hoped that employing Caribou's CRISPR genome editing platform to engineer CAR-T cells to withstand host immune attack would enable the development of the next-generation of off-the-shelf cellular therapies to benefit a broader patient population.

"Genome-edited CAR-T cell therapies hold tremendous potential"Under the multi-year agreement, AbbVie will use Caribou's next-generation Cas12a CRISPR hybrid RNA-DNA (chRDNA) genome editing and cell therapy technologies to research and develop two new CAR-T cell therapies directed to targets specified by AbbVie.