LONDON, UK: 4basebio PLC (LON: 4BB), the specialist life sciences group focused on exploiting intellectual property in the field of cell and gene therapies and DNA vaccines, announced a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) between its wholly owned subsidiary 4basebio Discovery Limited and Leucid Bio Limited, a biotech company pioneering next-generation Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell (CAR-T) Therapies for hard-to-treat cancers.

CAR-T therapy is an ex-vivo cell therapy which involves genetically reprogramming a patient’s T-cells to recognise and destroy cancer cells. While current practice relies on integrating viral vectors to deliver the genetic payloads to generate the CAR T-cells, non-viral based approaches, such as MaxCyte’s electroporation technology, are gaining popularity given their scalability, improved safety profile and flexibility in delivering payloads aimed at creating allogeneic, off-the-shelf CAR T-cells.

Under the JDA, the companies will evaluate the use of 4basebio’s Hermes™ non-viral nanoparticle and synthetic hpDNATM technology for enhanced delivery of genetic payloads to generate CART-cells. The successful outcome of this project will pave the way for development of a novel, high-performance and more cost-effective cell engineering method for CAR-T products.

Leucid Bio recently closed a £11.5m Series A financing round to progress its ongoing development of next generation CAR-T therapies. The company’s pCAR technology gives properties to the cells that enable them to consistently outperform previous generations of CAR-T therapies in pre-clinical studies.

Dr Heikki Lanckriet, CEO and CSO for 4basebio, said: “We are very excited to be working with Leucid Bio, a pioneer in next-generation CAR-T therapies, in developing a novel cell engineering approach for CAR-T products.”

Artin Moussavi, CEO of Leucid Bio, said: “We are delighted to be working with 4basebio in developing a safer, more scalable cell engineering process for the generation of allogeneic CAR-T therapies using their innovative HermesTM non-viral delivery platform.”