GSK and Lyell Immunopharma collaborate on cancer cell therapies

UK pharma maor GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK) today announced a five-year collaboration with California, USA-based biotech Lyell Immunopharma, to develop new technologies to improve cell therapies for cancer patients.

The collaboration will apply Lyell’s technologies to further strengthen GSK’s cell therapy pipeline, including GSK3377794, which targets the NY-ESO-1 antigen that is expressed across multiple cancer types. No financial details of the agreement have been disclosed.

Interest in such treatments has grown since 2017, when Novartis’ (NOVN: VX) Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) CAR-T cell medicine became the first gene therapy to receive US regulatory approval. GSK, which does not yet have its own CAR-T cell product but is looking at developing cell and gene therapies, indicated in July that it was in discussions with Lyell.

Could result in cell therapies for solid tumor cancers

To date, two cell therapies have been approved for blood-borne cancers, but engineered T cells have not yet delivered strong clinical activity in common solid tumors. Improving the “fitness” of T cells and delaying the onset of T cell exhaustion could help engineered T cell therapies become more effective. Combining GSK’s strong cell and gene therapy programs with Lyell’s technologies may allow the joint research team to maximize the activity and specificity of cell therapies in solid tumor cancers, where there is a high unmet medical need.