so welcome to expert talks by kalkine tv i'm sage and today's guest is jennifer chow ceo and
managing director of chimeric therapeutics and for some background chimeric therapeutics is committed
to developing the most innovative and promising cell therapies the company has a pipeline of
natural killer nk cell derived therapies and t cell derived therapies under different phases
of clinical trials and jennifer chow the ceo and managing director of chimeric therapeutics
who has 20 years experience in commercial strategy for cell therapy and oncology and more will share
her insights on the recent developments at this biotech firm welcome to the show jennifer
thank you so much for having me sage it's great to see you again yes it's so great that we can
connect and catch up on the news from chimeric. i believe it's been an extremely busy year for you
it has it has been a very very busy year and and we're thrilled with the progress we've been making
that's great well hopefully you're getting through the delays that were caused by the pandemic era
and i guess you're getting through that the bottleneck that might have built up as well
yes absolutely i think the uh the pandemic years have certainly had an impact on all of us yes well
turmeric is busily developing cancer treatments based on cell therapies can you help our viewers
understand what cell therapy is briefly absolutely sage and it sounds probably much more complicated
than it actually is cell therapy in its sort of simplest idea is just when you're using the body
cells live cells to be able to cure or treat a disease and and probably the the most simple
way to think about it or what a cell therapy is sage is actually a blood transfusion right so
everybody's familiar with the idea of people that have blood transfusions to save their lives that's
a cell therapy the cell therapies we're developing just happen to have you know a little bit more
engineering to them they have some genetic enhancements things like that but essentially
it all starts in the same place where we're using live cells to be able to treat diseases
that sounds like a very organic process we'd love to find out more because um i'm not sure if
organic is the right word to be honest although it sounds like you're working with the body's natural
structure of proteins and cells we'd love to find out more through this interview so one of your
research projects was recently the cover story in the highly prestigious journal nature cancer
congratulations about that thank you so much yeah that was wonderful news for us and what does this
development actually mean for chimeric yes sage you know what it it really is quite incredible
to have the kerti this is our cdh17 carte featured on the cover of nature cancer and so
that car t cell therapy has been in development at the university of pennsylvania for over a
decade and they have done an incredible amount of work over that past decade to really optimize
the cdh17 car t making sure that we build it so it is the best for safety and efficacy testing it
to make sure that it is going to be safe when we go to look to put it in humans and the work that
the team at the university of pennsylvania did to develop and optimize and then test the cdh17 car
i believe was just so elegant and truly you know field leading that they found this new
target for cancer the cdh17 antigen target for cartese that um you know it wound up on the cover
of nature cancer being obviously recognized as the important work it is for the field today
so for us it really just means that that the work that the team at university of pennsylvania has
done on our cartiva cdh17 car t is really being recognized for how how elegant and impressive it
is and i think it gives us a great foundation as we're getting ready to move that asset into clinic
so it gives us a lot of confidence as we're moving that asset towards clinical trials now
exactly because while you're working with this such high level um experiments at this preclinical
stage it sounds great in theory but if you're getting the confidence of the fact that it's
going to work in practice the dedication that the team puts into it must really pay off so
congratulations thank you um chimeric has received excellent outcomes from phase one study of the
core nk platform as well so where do you see this program progressing in the upcoming months please
yeah i think um you know what stage you're absolutely right our korean k platform which
uses nk cells in an off-the-shelf therapy um has had an incredibly exciting couple of months
there was initial phase one clinical data that was published and what we saw in that data
was incredibly encouraging for us we saw efficacy safety we saw expansion and persistence which
really means the cells are staying alive so really important markers for us i think probably what was
most notable in that data to us though was that in blood cancers we saw there was three patients
treated it was a very small dose escalation trial there were three patients that were treated with
blood cancers all three of those patients were able to achieve disease stability and one of
those patients actually had a complete response so sage their cancer was gone and probably you
know the most significant thing was not just was it gone but 16 15 16 months later it's still gone
so really improv you know we're really really promising results with that phase one clinical
trial so in the upcoming months your question about where do we see it going we really are
looking to build off that trial everything we learned in that trial about which patients are
really responding well to the nk platform you know it's safety and how we go forward to really
continue to develop that so we we see you know starting to build out and design and develop new
trials that is amazing news to hear that um it has actually worked and helped to save somebody's life
so far exactly yeah but you know what that is is the most rewarding part of what we do when you
hear a story like that it was a young girl's age in their mid-30s and and here 15 16 months later
she's still cancer-free it's pretty incredible yes of course um the agreement with the u.s based
woozy advanced therapies sounds yes strategic move yes um we would love to know the specific
benefits of this partnership and and how it will enable further clinical studies it's
a great question sage so wushi is a very very well-known large manufacturer of cell therapies
numbers of other things but our partner is the advanced therapies group and and they really have
expertise and experience in manufacturing cell therapies and for us we were looking for a partner
that had that expertise and experience that would allow us to continue to grow our clinical programs
so we needed someone that could continue to manufacture to larger numbers and had the
capacity to grow with us and and we are so excited to have found a partner in wushi there we're going
to be manufacturing cortoxin cartier and our cdh17 car t at their facility in pennsylvania
and i can tell you from having come back from it it is an incredibly impressive facility sage
and we're really looking forward to being able to work with them because it will just help us move
our clinical trial programs forward faster sounds great best of luck with that joint venture thank
you and kamerick also entered into a strategic partnership with be the march biotherapies so it
sounds like you've been on an expansionary phase can you please tell us how the agreement would
advance the company's product development and delivery yeah absolutely and i think you know um
the wuxi agreement and the be the match agreement are really sort of two pieces of the same puzzle
what we've been looking to do sage is put all of the pieces in place that we need to have
there so that we can grow our clinical programs out so we have lots of capacity and capability
to be able to have multi-site trials to grow our clinical development programs and so just as we
needed wuxi to be able to manufacture more more product uh the role of be the mat actually is
is something that's a little bit unique to cell therapies their role is as a logistics provider
so with car t cell therapy sage each individual therapy is made for each individual patient so
we start with taking the blood from a patient somewhere in the world and then we send that over
to the manufacturing facility wuxi's manufacturing facility in pennsylvania they do the genetic
engineering there freeze the cells and send them back to wherever that patient was located and be
the matches rule really becomes about organizing all of the planes trains and automobiles to make
sure that the cells get from the patient to the manufacturing facility safely and securely
and then actually the drug product is able to get back to that patient safely and securely
and so you know be the match is a group that has over 30 years experience doing this
they do it in the united states for all of the cell transplants the stem cell transplants
so great for us to have their expertise and their experience joining us and really that
that other piece to the puzzle to make sure that we can expand our programs
fantastic well i hope that goes well for you um the cells have to be in perfect uh
condition to be able to work on successfully and to gain the results that you need that are not
uh in some way skewed i suppose so it's a very important part of the process
um you've previously worked on developing and commercializing car t cell therapies
as we finish up the discussion today jennifer how will or how well i should say do you believe
chameric is placed to bring the promise of cell therapy to life for more patients with cancer yeah
you know what extremely well sage i think that a lot of that um comes from insights and experience
you learn over time you mentioned that i've worked on commercializing developing these types of
assets i've been very fortunate and privileged i believe to work on four of the currently approved
fda car t cell therapies there's only six of them and i've worked on four of them and and my team
has over together with my team we have over 50 years experience working in this area we've worked
on over 30 different types of cell therapies and i think we are incredibly well positioned because
of that experience and expertise in this specific area to be able to take the assets that we have
that have such incredible scientific promise and bring them through development so that we can get
them to patients and i really do think that in this space having that experience and expertise
to take the great science forward is critical so i believe we're positioned in a great way we have
phenomenal science you can see it's you know we're seeing clinical trial results we're seeing our
assets featured on very prestigious journals and when we bring that together with an experienced
team i think we're really well positioned to be able to to bring that promise to patients
yes well i mean if the results are proving anything it's proving that your work is really
paying off and so proud to say that comeric is partly an australian company as well so
thank you so much for sharing your insights today was there anything you'd like to share before we
close off the discussion jennifer no you know i think we just can look forward to continuing to
update everybody on what we're doing certainly thank everybody who has been supporting us along
the way and uh we'll continue to update you on our progress that's fantastic well hopefully the next
six months will be just as busy and profitable as well as successful thank you so much sage it's
great to see you you too jennifer and if you just joined us we had a very informative discussion
with jennifer chao she's a ceo and managing director at chimeric therapeutics please watch
the full interview at kalkine media's youtube channel and keep watching for more of these expert
talks and market insights until the next episode stay apprised and invest wise with kalkine media