#ASH18: Al­lo­gene ticks off a high CR rate for up­dat­ed off-the-shelf CAR-T pi­o­neer. But get­ting just the right kind of im­muno­sup­pres­sion is cru­cial

So far this year Al­lo­gene has bar­reled out of left field with a pair of the most ex­pe­ri­enced CAR-T ex­ecs in the in­dus­try steer­ing the new busi­ness to a record-set­ting (for now) IPO. And they’re head­ed straight in­to their first up­date on da­ta for what an off-the-shelf CAR-T can do for pa­tients suf­fer­ing from acute lym­phoblas­tic leukemia — with what they be­lieve is a man­age­able safe­ty pro­file.

Still tin­ker­ing with what they en­vi­sion is just the right kind of edit­ed CAR-T for the work, their UCART19 pro­gram — picked up from Pfiz­er and part­nered with Cel­lec­tis — pro­duced some promis­ing proof-of-con­cept re­sults on the first 21 pa­tient re­sults pooled from two small stud­ies. Four­teen out of 17 pre-treat­ed with a stan­dard flu/cy lym­phode­ple­tion reg­i­men plus an im­muno­sup­press­ing ther­a­py achieved a com­plete re­sponse with sig­nif­i­cant cell ex­pan­sion.

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