Latest news with #TILtherapy
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
ScaleReady announces multiple G-Rex® Grants have been awarded to investigators at University of Minnesota's Center for Genome Engineering
ST. PAUL, Minn., July 31, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- ScaleReady, in collaboration with Wilson Wolf Manufacturing, Bio-Techne Corporation (NASDAQ: TECH) and CellReady, today announced that three investigators at the University of Minnesota's Center for Genome Engineering have been awarded $665,000 of G-Rex® Grant funding. Dr. Branden Moriarity, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Co-Director of Center for Genome Engineering, Co-Director of the Genome Engineering Shared Resource, and Member of the Masonic Cancer Center, was awarded a $300,000 G-Rex Grant to support technology transfer, process development and qualification runs for a novel hyper-functional Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) Natural Killer (NK) cell therapy for the treatment of advanced epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) in a Phase 1 clinical trial. Dr. Beau Webber, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Co-Director of the Genome Engineering Shared Resource, Member of the Center for Genome Engineering, and Member of the Masonic Cancer Center, was awarded a $240,000 G-Rex Grant to support preclinical development of a novel tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy for the treatment of various solid tumors. Dr. Joseph Skeate, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, was awarded a $125,000 G-Rex Grant to support process development and optimization of a G-Rex® centric manufacturing processes for production of a TPP1 expressing T cells therapy for the treatment of Batten Disease, a group of rare, inherited neurodegenerative disorders that typically begin in childhood. "We are highly appreciative of receiving significant G-Rex Grant funding that will improve G-Rex centric manufacturing for our unique cell and gene therapy drug products. The willingness of our Minnesota neighbors, Wilson Wolf and Bio-Techne, to allocate financial resources to our University of Minnesota cell and gene therapy (CGT) programs and the CGT field as a whole is greatly appreciated," said Dr. Branden Moriarity. "The state of Minnesota has a long history of pioneering adoptive cell therapy efforts dating back to 1968 when the first bone marrow transplant with a matched related donor occurred at the University of Minnesota. It's our pleasure to award G-Rex Grant funds to these leading investigators at the Center for Genome Engineering to advance their diverse portfolio of innovate cell therapies for devastating cancers and rare diseases and we are fortunate to be able to play a small role in supporting Minnesota's contributions to the field of Cell & Gene Therapy," said John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Wolf and co-inventor of G-Rex. ScaleReady's G-Rex Grant Program has now surpassed $40M of no-cost product commitments to grant recipients with the goal of advancing the state of cell and gene-modified cell therapy (CGT) development and manufacturing. Individual Grant Awards are worth up to $300,000. G-Rex Grant Recipients also gain access to exclusive support from ScaleReady's growing consortium of G-Rex Grant Partners who bring best-in-class tools and technologies as well as unparalleled knowledge and expertise in the areas of cGMP manufacturing, quality and regulatory affairs, CGT business operations, and more. Importantly, ScaleReady has just introduced yet another FREE program to accelerate the universal presence of highly efficient and scalable CGT manufacturing. Under this program ScaleReady has partnered with Hanson Wade to launch an event series called LEAN Cell & Gene™. All CGT entities are invited to attend and will learn how to systematically identify and eliminate waste, stabilize business operations, increase drug product quality and supply, and develop a LEAN approach to cell and gene therapy development and manufacturing. For more information about the G-Rex® Grant Program, please contact info@ For more information about LEAN Cell & Gene™, please use this link to register for the free event series. About ScaleReadyScaleReady provides the field of cell and gene-modified cell therapy (CGT) with a G-Rex centric manufacturing platform that enables the world's most practical, flexible, scalable, and affordable CGT drug product development and manufacturing. The G-Rex manufacturing platform is currently used by a rapidly growing list of over 800 organizations and is producing drug products for approximately 50% of CGT clinical trials as well as 5 commercially approved CGT drugs. CGT entities relying on the breadth and scope of ScaleReady's expertise can expect to save years of time and millions of dollars on the path to CGT commercialization. For more information about the ScaleReady G-Rex® Grant Program, please contact info@ About Wilson Wolf ManufacturingWilson Wolf ( is dedicated to simplifying cell and gene-modified cell (CGT) therapy research, process development, and manufacturing. This is being accomplished through its scalable G-Rex technology, which is used throughout the world in CGT applications ranging from basic research to commercial drug production. Wilson Wolf's mission is to create hope for cancer patients, one G-Rex® device at a time. About Bio-Techne CorporationBio-Techne Corporation (NASDAQ: TECH) is a global life sciences company providing innovative tools and bioactive reagents for the research and clinical diagnostic communities. Bio-Techne, in partnership with Wilson Wolf, is creating products such as media and cytokines that are specifically tailored to G-Rex® Bioreactors, including right-sized reagent quantities in containers that are tailored to high throughput closed-system manufacturing. For more information on Bio-Techne and its brands, please visit or follow the Company on social media at: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube. Contact: David Clair, Vice President, Investor Relations & Corporate About CellReady LLCCellReady is the world's first and only G-Rex centric contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) specializing in G-Rex based cell and gene-modified cell therapy development and manufacturing. The company offers a wide range of services to support the development and commercialization of these therapies. CellReady's mission is to create hope for cancer patients, one G-Rex® process at a time. 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Medscape
24-07-2025
- Health
- Medscape
ASCO 2025: Melanoma TILs, Toxicity, and Diet Insights
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Welcome, everybody. My name is Teresa Amaral. Today I'm here with you to follow up on my presentation on the best of ASCO 2025. Today, we'll have two different sections. The first one is dedicated to the rapid oral communications, and the second one is dedicated to the oral communications that took place on the last day of the congress. For the rapid oral communications, we'll focus on one topic that came through three presentations, tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy. Then we will look into a very interesting aspect: the reduction in toxicity associated with immunotherapy that we know is an important aspect for patients that need to receive immunotherapy. And finally, we'll look into a potential modifiable factor that might be associated with better outcomes in patients receiving immunotherapy, which is a diet rich in fiber. In the oral communications, we'll focus on the adjuvant trials — two of them that were quite important to be presented in this session. Then [I'll discuss] a trial that dealt with an unanswered question, which is how long should we treat patients in the metastatic setting. And finally, we will look into two different trials. The first one was on sequencing therapy, which was the DREAMseq trial on the final analysis, and then [there was] a specific analysis for patients that have symptomatic brain metastases, which are still a population of patients that unfortunately are excluded from the majority of clinical trials despite the fact that they do not a very good outcome. Starting with the TIL therapy, the first trial or the first presentation that I want to show you is a new way of applying TIL therapy. Basically, this is a new engineered TIL cell therapy that is intended to be given to patients that already received immune checkpoint inhibitors — so [patients] that are resistant to this therapy. But the interesting part of this type of therapy is that it doesn't require giving interleukin-2, and it also is possible to be given with a low dose of lymphodepletion. This is one of the reasons why I decided to bring this study because we know that TIL therapy might have a good outcome in the long run and these are the results that we are going to discuss in the next presentation. One of the problems is the toxicity that is associated with the pre-therapy and the after-therapy that we need to give to these patients, which includes this lymphodepleting chemotherapy and then the interleukin-2. What these very preliminary data showed is that it is indeed feasible to do this type of therapy by not giving interleukin-2 and reducing the lymphodepleting chemotherapy, and that the overall response rate was quite reassuring because we have an overall response rate that is around 67%. The median duration of response was not reached. Of course, we will need to wait for further data because this phase 1/2 trial is recruiting and we will need to confirm this data further in a broader population with more patients. But I think these results are quite reassuring and will maybe allow us to give this type of therapy to a broader spectrum of patients, as we don't need to have fitter patients to receive this therapy because we have low toxicity. The next discussion, or the next work, that was presented was indeed quite interesting because it looked into the 5-year-old outcome of another TIL product that is called lifileucel. Basically, what the authors showed was that this one-time therapy that was given was able to demonstrate durable and deepening responses in patients with advanced melanoma. It was also interesting to see the long-term toxicity is not more than what we saw before, because the toxicity is mostly associated with the interleukin-2 and lymphodepleting chemotherapy that is necessary to give with this product. So in line with what we discussed in the previous work, this is one of the reasons why most patients, or some patients, cannot receive this type of therapy. What we saw was that after 5 years, approximately 20% of the patients remained alive. Obviously, the best outcomes are seen in the patients that do respond. If the patient responds, the chances that they have a long-term outcome are significant, which is expected. So, the other side shows that this might be feasible, at least for approximately one fifth of the population. Another point that I would like to go through with you is that we saw two works looking into TILs that are definitely a potential therapeutic option for patients that received therapy in the first line, or patients that did not benefit from immunotherapy in the first line. The third work that I would like to discuss with you is the fact — and it was also presented in these rapid oral communications — that indeed not all TILs that we give to patients are the same. What the authors from this work looked into are the infusion product characteristics that are able to predict the response of patients that are treated with TILs. What they showed is the TIL persistence and also the distinctive TIL population in terms of immunophenotypic features, in terms of the proportion of CD8+ T cells, and the high surface expression of LAG3+. All of these characteristics are associated with improved TIL outcomes in patients with metastatic melanoma, meaning that not everything that we infuse that are called TILs work exactly the same and have the same influence, let's say, on the patient's response. This is obviously important because in the future, we might need to concentrate on some strategies, or on other strategies, that modulate ex vivoTIL expansion, so that we have the optimal TIL phenotype associated with better outcomes and we make sure the TILs that we are giving to our patients are the ones that will most likely produce a better outcome — a longer response, but a more durable response. I found this work quite interesting because it's always nice and important to look into these details and understand exactly what we are treating our patients with and how these treatment characteristics influence the patient's outcomes. The second point I would like to discuss with you is the toxicity that I mentioned in the very beginning. We treat a significant amount of patients with immunotherapy, but we know that one of the problems of immunotherapy is the toxicity associated with the therapy. Several strategies are being investigated to reduce the toxicity associated with immunotherapy. One of the strategies that was presented this year is looking into interleukin-6 receptor blocking with an antibody called sarilumab. This was tested in patients that received a combination of ipilimumab, nivolumab, and relatlimab — patients with resectable stage III or stage IV melanoma. Basically, what the author showed was that indeed it was possible to reduce the toxicity associated with this triple combination. Not only did this reduce the grade 3 to grade 5 immune-related adverse events to 12% when we use this interleukin-6 receptor inhibitor, but it also resulted in the best overall response rate being more than 60% — 64%, approximately. This means that it might not only be able to reduce the severe toxicity, so grade 3 and grade 4 adverse events, but also allow patients to have a long-term benefit — especially because this is one of the highest overall response rates that we saw recently in terms of combination of immunotherapy. Obviously, these data need to be confirmed by a larger trial looking into whether this triple combination with, or without, this interleukin-6 receptor inhibitor allows lower toxicity and the high response rate we saw in this smaller trial. Finally, for the rapid oral communications, I would like to show you a trial that looks into acting on some potential modulated factors, including the diet of the patients that we treat with immune checkpoint inhibitors. This was a randomized phase 2 trial that looked into a high-fiber diet intervention in patients who received immune checkpoint inhibitors. What they showed is that it is feasible to do these kinds of studies, but it's quite challenging, especially because some patients progressed earlier or abandoned the study due to other aspects that did not really have to do with the diet itself. Giving this high-fiber diet is safe and it's also well tolerated, and it seems that this high-fiber diet might lead to improved responses in patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors. I must say that it might lead [to these responses], only because these are very preliminary data and they need some kind of confirmation before we start prescribing high fiber diets to all patients that are receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors. I think it's very interesting that these types of factors are being analyzed and are being discussed and investigated because these might be, I would say, simple changes that we can make in order to improve the patient's outcomes to the current therapies that we offer them anyhow. Moving into oral communications, I will start by looking into the adjuvant trials. Two important adjuvant trials were discussed. The first one was RELATIVITY-098. This was a trial that investigated programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) monotherapy vs PD-1 plus a LAG-3 inhibitor in the adjuvant setting. Unfortunately, the trial was negative, but I think it's very important that we show these negative trials because it allows us to understand what happened and prevents other companies or other groups from looking at the same question exactly the same way, because the reasons, or the potential reasons, for the failure of the trial were not known or were not published. I think it's very important that these negative data are presented so that we can all learn and avoid repetition of the same issues. Basically, the combination did not improve relapse-free survival compared to the monotherapy, although there were no new safety data. Interestingly enough, from the biomarker analysis and the preliminary analysis that was presented, the message came out that for this combination to work, it may be necessary for some tumor cells to be present and not completely excised, as was [the case] in this setting. These comparisons were made with the same combination in the metastatic setting, where the combination was better than immunotherapy. This kind of analysis is always interesting to look into because it might give us some hints on where we can move with this combination in the future.
The Independent
02-06-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Innovative treatment uses patient's own immune system to fight cancer
An innovative treatment called lifileucel, which uses a patient's own immune system to combat advanced melanoma, has shown promising results in extending the lives of patients, according to researchers. In a trial led by The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust involving 153 patients, almost 20 per cent of those with advanced melanoma survived for five years after receiving lifileucel, with the majority experiencing tumour shrinkage. Experts suggest lifileucel could be a transformative option for patients with advanced melanoma, where the cancer has spread to other parts of the body. The treatment involves isolating and growing T cells from tumours in a lab before infusing them back into the patient to fight cancer, and it has already been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for advanced melanoma treatment. Zoe Phillips, a participant in the TIL therapy trial, experienced complete remission of her tumours six weeks after treatment, highlighting the potential of this therapy for patients with limited options.
