#AS­CO21: SQZ of­fers first clin­i­cal glimpse of un­ortho­dox cell ther­a­py man­u­fac­tur­ing tech — but check­point com­bo is still the way to go

More than sev­en years af­ter Ar­mon Sharei, then a PhD stu­dent at Bob Langer’s lab, first pub­lished a way to reengi­neer cells with­out vec­tors, the biotech they found­ed to­geth­er has the first hu­man da­ta in its hands.

SQZ Biotech — which gets its name from the cell-squeez­ing de­vice they cre­at­ed to open up a tem­po­rary win­dow for de­liv­ery of car­goes in­to cells — has two take-home mes­sages for the vir­tu­al AS­CO crowd: Its HPV-tar­get­ed cell ther­a­py looks safe among 12 pa­tients with HPV-pos­i­tive sol­id tu­mors, and could be man­u­fac­tured re­li­ably with­in 24 hours.

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