IsoPlexis Receives $1.8M National Cancer Institute Grant To Develop Automated Platform To Assess CAR-T Product Potency and Toxicity and Predict Patient Response
BRANFORD, Conn., Oct. 23, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- IsoPlexis Corporation (IsoPlexis), a privately held life sciences company at the forefront of single-cell analytics technology and the immune-based cancer treatment revolution, announced today that it has received $1.8 million in grant funding from the National Cancer Institute's Small Business Innovation Research (NCI SBIR) Development Center to develop an automated assay platform and informatics suite that can be used in larger clinical trials to test CAR-T patient product potency and toxicity, pre-infusion, in order to help predict patient response and inform usage of these therapies.
Using the NCI grant funding, IsoPlexis will develop a fully automated platform that trial centers can use to process patient samples and capture single-cell data at the pace required for large-scale blood cancer treatment clinical trials. IsoPlexis will also develop a comprehensive bioinformatics suite that will analyze large amounts of single-cell data and produce precise and predictive biomarker information.
Leading academic medical centers, including UCLA, will then use this newly developed IsoPlexis platform and informatics suite in blood cancer treatment clinical trials, providing them robust and predictive biomarkers for pre-infusion CAR-T potency and toxicity. The two-year grant was awarded on August 31, 2017.
Earlier this year, IsoPlexis released data - collected through collaborations with Kite, a Gilead Company, and other leading therapeutic developers in the CAR-T field - showing the promise of its platform in helping researchers assess product potency and toxicity and predict patient response.
"This new grant demonstrates the commitment to advancing CAR-T through investments, not only in the area of therapeutic discovery, but also in next-generation engineering technology," said Sean Mackay, IsoPlexis Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder. "We're excited to be in a position to further enable this fast-growing field to better characterize and understand these complex therapies, and improve treatments for high-need patients."
Dr. Antoni Ribas, Director of the Tumor Immunology Program at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, said, "IsoPlexis' technology is capable of tracking a greater amount of important data from individual cells, relative to existing technologies, enabling it to identify sensitive differences in cell therapy responders and non-responders. This funding will help expand the use of the IsoPlexis platform to more clinical settings throughout the world, helping to address critical needs in the rapidly growing CAR-T therapy area."
ABOUT ISOPLEXIS:
IsoPlexis, a privately held life sciences company, is developing novel technologies at the forefront of the revolution in immunity-based treatments of cancer. Using a next-generation diagnostic and therapeutic platform to identify patient responses at the single-cell level, IsoPlexis' original scientific leaders from Yale, Caltech, UCLA, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have advanced understandings of personalized therapies against various cancers. IsoPlexis is venture funded by Spring Mountain Capital, North Sound Ventures, and Connecticut Innovations, as well as supported through grant funding from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. For additional information on IsoPlexis, visit http://www.isoplexis.com or email info@isoplexis.com.
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SOURCE IsoPlexis
