Mucommune, a biotechnology company in Morrisville, North Carolina, has received up to $29.4 million in federal funding over six years to develop a new cancer therapy. The funding is provided through a research agreement with the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as part of the EMBODY program. This program supports research on engineering immune cells inside the body. The project focuses on developing an immunotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer, which is a leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide.
The therapy uses in vivo engineering of CAR-T cells. This process modifies a patient’s T-cells inside the body to target cancer cells. Traditional CAR-T therapies require removing, modifying, and reinfusing T-cells outside the body. While these therapies have been effective for blood cancers, they face challenges with solid tumors such as lung cancer. These challenges include high costs, long manufacturing times, and limited effectiveness.
Mucommune’s method uses a lentiviral transduction platform licensed from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This technology allows for genetic modification of T-cells directly in the patient. The approach may lower costs and improve access to CAR-T therapy. The company will use the ARPA-H funding to develop and test an in vivo CAR-T product that targets lung cancer cells…