Pitch 1-8 :Fighting cancer with Nobel Prize winning IPS Cell Technology

[Summary]

Every sixth death in the world is due to cancer, making it the second leading cause of death. In 2016, 8.9 million people are estimated to have died from the various forms of cancer. With the latest clinical advancement of cancer treatments, new therapies using immunocheck point inhibitors or chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells have demonstrated significant benefits in subsets of cancer patients. These therapies reactivate exhausted T cells or utilize activated T cells to attach tumor cells. However, the use of these is limited due to severe adverse events and therapy resistance.

Thyas Co. Ltd., (Thyas), supported by Kyoto University Innovation Capital Co. Ltd., a wholly owned investment firm of the university, is developing autologous immunotherapy with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC)-derived killer T cells for the treatment of cancers. The iPSC technology allows Thyas to stably supply a large quantity of tumor-specific T cells that have high proliferative capacity and potent killing activity. iPS-derived T cells generated from tumor specific T cells are expected to be safe since the T cells harvested from patients do not recognize normal tissues. The company is planning to initiate clinical trials with the T-cell product in late 2020, and to expand the trials worldwide after the safety is established in JAPAN.

[Mentors' comments]

　"Very interesting approach. How specifically are you gonna isolate the tumor specific T-Cells?"Dr. Kevin Grimes, Stanford University

　"Comparing to the Car-T what is the major advantage of this new therapy?."Dr. Dan Wang, Johnson & Johnson Innovation

[Profile]

Dr. Hitoshi obtained a MD degree and acquired PhD in immunology. He is familiar with immunology, cytokine signaling, immuno-oncology, cancer metabolism, metabolic diseases, and retroviral transduction systems. He has >15 year experience with heading oncology and metabolism researches (Target identification and validation, preclinical development of small molecule therapeutics) as a research director. He was involved in the IND filling process of multiple drugs.