 | |
| Company type | Société Anonyme |
|---|---|
| Nasdaq: CLLS (ADR) | |
| ISIN | FR0010425595 |
| Industry | Biotechnology, genome engineering, oncology |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Headquarters |
|
Key people | André Choulika (CEO) |
| Products | |
| Website | cellectis |
Cellectis is a French biopharmaceutical company. It develops genome-edited chimeric antigen receptor T-cell technologies for cancer immunotherapy. [1] It has offices in Paris, New York City, and Raleigh, North Carolina.
Cellectis was founded by André Choulika in 1999. [2] It built up a successful business based on the use of Meganuclease in genome engineering. Cellectis became a publicly traded company in 2007, and raised €21.2 million in a stock offering on Euronext. In 2010, it acquired Cyto Pulse, which had developed a new electroporation technology, [3] and in 2011 it paid €28 million for Cellartis, a Swedish biotechnology company. [2] In January 2011 the company licensed TALEN gene-editing technology from Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota. [4] [5] The company employed nearly 300 people in early 2014. [2]
With the advent of the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat) genome editing technique, the Cellectis meganuclease technology became uneconomic, and by 2013 the company was close to bankruptcy. It restructured, closed laboratories and reduced staff, and shifted research emphasis toward CAR-T technologies for cancer immunotherapy. Early in 2014 it reached a substantial financing deal with Servier, and later in the same year made a much larger agreement with Pfizer and Allogene. [2]
In March 2015 the company raised $228 million through a stock offering on NASDAQ. The shares fell by 15% in the first week of trading. [6]
Cellectis has two manufacturing facilities - one in Paris, France, and one in Raleigh, North Carolina. [7]
Cellectis formed the subsidiary of Calyxt in 2010 [8] to develop healthier food ingredients through gene editing. [9] Based in Roseville, Minnesota, the subsidiary filed for an IPO in June, 2017. [10]
Cellectis has developed CAR T-cell treatments for blood cancer. [11] Most CAR-T therapies under development as of 2017 involved taking T-cells from the person with cancer and applying gene therapy to those cells to activate them to attack the person's cancer; an autologous cell therapy approach. Cellectis' approach starts with T-cells taken from healthy donors (allogeneic or allograft) and modifying these base cells with gene editing to disable the gene that causes donor immune cells to attack their host (preventing graft vs host disease). The base cells can then be modified the same way other CAR-T therapeutics are. [12]
In 2017, UCART123 was in phase 1 trials for blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN) and acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). [13] In early September 2017, the FDA suspended Cellectis’ Phase I trials of UCART123 in the wake of the death of a BPDCN patient from cytokine release syndrome (CRS). [13] The FDA hold was lifted in November 2017 after reducing the dosage and with additional conditions. [14] Cellectis also has a phase 1 trial for UCART22 in B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) and received an IND approval from the FDA on their UCARTCS1 product candidate in multiple myeloma. [15]
Gene therapy is a medical technology that aims to produce a therapeutic effect through the manipulation of gene expression or through altering the biological properties of living cells.
Virotherapy is a treatment using biotechnology to convert viruses into therapeutic agents by reprogramming viruses to treat diseases. There are three main branches of virotherapy: anti-cancer oncolytic viruses, viral vectors for gene therapy and viral immunotherapy. These branches use three different types of treatment methods: gene overexpression, gene knockout, and suicide gene delivery. Gene overexpression adds genetic sequences that compensate for low to zero levels of needed gene expression. Gene knockout uses RNA methods to silence or reduce expression of disease-causing genes. Suicide gene delivery introduces genetic sequences that induce an apoptotic response in cells, usually to kill cancerous growths. In a slightly different context, virotherapy can also refer more broadly to the use of viruses to treat certain medical conditions by killing pathogens.
This page provides an alphabetical list of articles and other pages about biotechnology.
B-cell maturation antigen, also known as tumor necrosis factor receptor superfamily member 17 (TNFRSF17), is a protein that in humans is encoded by the TNFRSF17 gene.
Blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN) is a rare hematologic malignancy. It was initially regarded as a form of lymphocyte-derived cutaneous lymphoma and alternatively named CD4+CD56+ hematodermic tumor, blastic NK cell lymphoma, and agranular CD4+ NK cell leukemia. Later, however, the disease was determined to be a malignancy of plasmacytoid dendritic cells rather than lymphocytes and therefore termed blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm. In 2016, the World Health Organization designated BPDCN to be in its own separate category within the myeloid class of neoplasms. It is estimated that BPDCN constitutes 0.44% of all hematological malignancies.
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Pelareorep is a proprietary isolate of the unmodified human reovirus being developed as a systemically administered immuno-oncological viral agent for the treatment of solid tumors and hematological malignancies. Pelareorep is an oncolytic virus, which means that it preferentially lyses cancer cells. Pelareorep also promotes an inflamed tumor phenotype through innate and adaptive immune responses. Preliminary clinical trials indicate that it may have anti-cancer effects across a variety of cancer types when administered alone and in combination with other cancer therapies.
André Choulika is a biotechnologist, the inventor of nuclease-based genome editing and a pioneer in the analysis and use of meganucleases to modify complex genomes.
Kite Pharma is an American biotechnology company that develops cancer immunotherapy products with a primary focus on genetically engineered autologous CAR T cell therapy - a cell-based therapy which relies on chimeric antigen receptors and T cells. Founded in 2009, and based in Santa Monica, California, it was acquired by Gilead Sciences in 2017.
Juno Therapeutics Inc was an American biopharmaceutical company founded in 2013 through a collaboration of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and pediatrics partner Seattle Children's Research Institute. The company was launched with an initial investment of $120 million, with a remit to develop a pipeline of cancer immunotherapy drugs. The company raised $300 million through private funding and a further $265 million through their IPO.
Prescient Therapeutics Ltd is a clinical stage oncology company. The company is focused on the development of a universal CAR-T platform (OmniCAR), enhanced CAR-T cell manufacturing & function (CellPryme) and on two small molecule drug targeted therapies.
Cancer Breakthroughs 2020, also known as Cancer Moonshot 2020 is a coalition with the goal of finding vaccine-based immunotherapies against cancer. By pooling the resources of multinational pharmaceutical, biotechnology companies, academic centers and oncologists, it intends to create access to over 60 novel and approved agents under exploration in the war against cancer and is expected to enable rapid testing of novel immunotherapy combination protocols. The initiative is being managed by a consortium of companies called The National Immunotherapy Coalition.
Editas Medicine, Inc.,, is a clinical-stage biotechnology company which is developing therapies for rare diseases based on CRISPR gene editing technology. Editas headquarters is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has facilities in Boulder, Colorado.
Intellia Therapeutics, Inc. is an American clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on developing novel, potentially curative therapeutics leveraging CRISPR-based technologies. The company's in vivo programs use intravenously administered CRISPR as the therapy, in which the company's proprietary delivery technology enables highly precise editing of disease-causing genes directly within specific target tissues. Intellia's ex vivo programs use CRISPR to create the therapy by using engineered human cells to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases.
The Immune Response Corporation (IRC) was a pharmaceutical company that worked in the development of immunotherapeutic products. The firm was founded by Jonas Salk and Kevin Kimberlin when Kimberlin, "asked Salk to become lead scientific advisor for a new biotech company specializing in 'anti-idiotypes,' a novel vaccine technology." Salk called the proposal "liberating."
Sangamo Therapeutics, Inc. is an American biotechnology company based in Brisbane, California. It applies cell and gene therapy to combat haemophilia and other genetic diseases.
Mustang Bio is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company founded in 2015 and headquartered in Worcester, MA, U.S. Operating as a partner company of Fortress Biotech, Mustang Bio develops CAR-T immunotherapies and gene therapies for multiple diseases, including hematologic cancers, solid tumors, and X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (X-SCID).
bluebird bio, Inc., based in Somerville, Massachusetts, is a biotechnology company that develops gene therapies for severe genetic disorders.
CRISPR Therapeutics AG is a Swiss–American biotechnology company headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. It was one of the first companies formed to utilize the CRISPR gene editing platform to develop medicines for the treatment of various rare and common diseases. The company has approximately 500 employees and has offices in Zug, Switzerland, Boston, Massachusetts, San Francisco, California and London, United Kingdom. Its manufacturing facility in Framingham, Massachusetts won the Facilities of the Year Award (FOYA) award in 2022. The company’s lead program, exagamglogene autotemcel, or exa-cel, was granted regulatory approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2023.
Precision BioSciences, Inc. is a publicly traded American clinical stage gene editing company headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. Founded in 2006, Precision is focused on developing both in vivo and ex vivo gene editing therapies using its proprietary "ARCUS" genome editing platform.