CyGenics to team with Johns Hopkins

Cell therapy company CyGenics (ASX:CYN) and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have entered into a collaborative research agreement as part of a pre-clinical study directed at a new treatment strategy for patients with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML).

"We understand this deal is the first of its kind in the world," said CyGenics CEO Steven Fang. "We believe that through this collaboration the practice of cancer treatment will change and be much more precise."

Johns Hopkins has been conducting preclinical studies in ex vivo expansion of purged stem cell grafts prior to transplant and CyGenics and Johns Hopkins are collaborating to use the CyGenics' proprietary stem cell expansion platform, as the growth platform for these cells. The agreement provides CyGenics with an opportunity to exclusively develop and commercialise a combined stem cell purge and expansion kit aimed at the segment of the market that requires both purging and stem cell expansion.

"Combining the two technologies means you can hand pick the cells that you want to wipe out -- the malignant cells -- and then choose stem cells to expand."

There are currently approximately 60,000 new cases of AML globally each year and the standard treatment is chemotherapy. When standard chemotherapy is not successful the next option is, high-dose chemotherapy which destroys all bone marrow cells and ongoing blood cell production. Following the high-dose chemotherapy treatment, in order to restore the bone marrow, the patient receives a transplant of autologous (patient's own) stem cells. These stem cells automatically home and start producing new blood cells in the bone marrow.

Patients can suffer a relapse of AML due to the presence of some residual leukaemia in the stem cell graft. A number of studies have shown that treating the stem cell graft to kill off or purge the residual leukaemia prior to transplantation may result in better survival rates for patients undergoing the treatment.

However the purging process also kills the original cells that are responsible for the early phases of blood regeneration. This results in delayed engraftment in the patient, during which time the patient is prone to infection and other complications. The goal of the joint program between CyGenics and Johns Hopkins is to evaluate methods for expanding the population of original cells that are responsible for the early phases of rapid stem cell engraftment to enable blood regeneration.

"The preclinical studies have a short term time frame and we are then looking to conduct clinical phase I and II trials in conjunction with the platform technology," Fang said. "Johns Hopkins has a very well established team under the leadership of Dr Ian McNiece and we are privileged to be one of the select few to be chosen to work with them."