LONDON (Alliance News) - PureTech Health PLC on Monday said it has launched Vor BioPharma, an immuno-oncology company dedicated to developing a new class of targeted cell therapies in cancer.
Vor BioPharma was co-founded with Siddhartha Mukherjee, who is assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University in the US, and is working on a new approach to chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy.
CAR T-cell therapy modifies the body's own immune cells to recognise and kill cancer cells. It has emerged as a "promising therapy" for patients with advanced B-cell leukaemias, but has only shown limited results in treating solid tumours, PureTech said.
"CAR T-cell therapies have shown remarkable progress in the clinic, yet their applicability beyond a small subset of cancers is currently very limited," said Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, scientific advisory board member at Vor.
"This technology seeks to address bottlenecks that prevent CAR T-cell therapy from becoming more broadly useful in treating cancers outside of B-cell cancers," Gambhir added.
"We look forward to advancing this technology that has the potential to expand immuno-oncology to currently untreatable, fatal malignancies," PureTech Vice President David Steinberg said in a statement.
By Karolina Kaminska; karolinakaminska@alliancenews.com @KarolinaAllNews
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PureTech (PRTC)