Prescient Therapeutics (ASX:PTX) has struck a collaboration agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific to advance the development and commercialization of a highly scalable version of its game-changing OmniCAR cell therapy technology.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is a global pioneer in cell and gene technology. The development strategy for the agreement will assess the feasibility of employing automated, closed cell therapy solutions to create a revolutionary process for producing cell treatments on Prescient’s OmniCAR platform using non-viral approaches.

Prescient is developing personalized cancer medicines, with the agreement using Thermo Fisher’s expertise in cell and gene therapy to establish a scalable cell therapy platform. The work program intends to create next-generation OmniCAR cells with improved efficiency, reduced costs, and unrivaled repeatability.

Prescient has had a week of good news. It recently signed a manufacturing services agreement with specialist cell therapy manufacturer Q-Gen Cell Therapeutics (Q-Gen) to generate its OmniCAR cell lines for planned clinical studies.

Advancement of CAR-T cell Therapy

To construct chimeric antigen receptors (CARs)-expressing immune cells, all CAR-T treatments approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) so far, and most CAR-T therapies in development, viral vectors are used to insert genetic material into immune cells.

Viral vectors are costly, inefficient, and time-consuming to create, and are frequently a major bottleneck and cost contributor in CAR-T production. Viral transduction procedures are very sophisticated manual processes that are difficult to transfer, labor expenses, and susceptible to operator variances, resulting in highly variable and unexpected results.

This agreement’s work plan will develop OmniCAR cells using Thermo Fisher’s patented technology and specialized cell and gene therapy manufacturing skills.

A significant Prescient goal is to develop the OmniCAR platform’s second generation by being able to manufacture OmniCAR cells with improved efficiency and cheaper prices that are suited for tech transfer to GMP-licensed contract development and manufacturing organizations throughout the world.

This, in turn, contributes to Prescient’s idea of decentralized manufacturing, which is best suited for multi-center treatments throughout development and, eventually, commercial roll-out.

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