Caribou Biosciences said Thursday that its CRISPR-edited T-cell therapy induced complete remissions in four of five patients with advanced B-cell lymphoma — the first clinical trial data to emerge from the biotech company co-founded by Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna.
The study results are preliminary but establish Caribou’s presence among a group of drugmakers leveraging genome-editing technologies to engineer different types of immune cells into off-the-shelf, cancer-killing treatments.
In some respects, Caribou’s therapy, called CB-010, is similar to other on-demand CAR-T treatments directed against lymphoma. It starts with donor T cells that are genetically altered — in this case with the company’s proprietary CRISPR-based genome editing tool — to detect and kill malignant blood cells that express an antigen, or protein target, called CD19 on their surface. A second gene edit is made to prevent the cells from being rejected by the body as foreign.
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