Frankfurt Gerhard Ehninger moved a lot in his life – as a doctor and as a researcher. The medical professor co-founded the German bone marrow donor database, taught for two and a half decades at the University of Dresden, where he set up a top center for the treatment of tumor diseases, helped develop a new approach for cell-based cancer therapies and founded two companies.
Now the 69-year-old Swabian is driving a new project. If this succeeds, many cancer patients could in the future be cured with immune cells from foreign donors. That would take cancer therapy to a new level.
AvenCell Therapeutics is the name of the new company that Ehninger has just co-founded in the USA. The name stands for cell therapies of the future.
For a few years now, blood cancer patients have been able to be treated with their own genetically modified immune cells – these so-called Car-T-cell therapies are an option for patients for whom classic cancer treatments do not help or do not help enough. Ehninger’s vision is to be able to treat around 90 percent of these cancer patients with immune cells from around 30 healthy donors.
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“Just as there are universal donors whose blood can be given to many people, modern genetic engineering methods can make the immune cells of individual donors suitable for a large number of people,” he says. The advantage of these so-called allogeneic cell therapies: immune cells from healthy adults can be replicated in foreign donors. “They could be kept in stock like in a pharmacy and would be available quickly,” says Ehninger.
Promising field of research
In contrast, the immune cells of leukemia patients, which are genetically modified in CAR-T therapies today, are often weakened by previous chemotherapies. In addition, it often takes more than two months before a sufficient number of immune cells can be grown in the laboratory.
That is why allogeneic cell therapies are a promising field of research in which many scientific institutions and companies are currently bustling, as industry expert Peter Neubeck from the venture capitalist Kurma Partners says.
Stem cell and blood cancer expert Ehninger helped develop the novel approach that the CAR-T therapies are pursuing. The company Cellex, which he founded in 2001, not only offers stem and bone marrow donations for patients and for research purposes, but now also manufactures cell therapy products and handles logistics worldwide. According to Ehninger, the company with around 150 employees is expected to generate sales of more than 40 million euros this year.
In addition, the doctor is testing a new technology with the Cellex subsidiary Gemoab, founded in 2011 in Dresden, which is intended to solve a major problem that the CAR-T treatments currently available on the market have. Because the tuned immune cells that are given to patients to kill the cancer cells often trigger an excessive immune reaction in the body, which can be life-threatening, even if it is now treatable.
Gemoab wants to avoid this cytokine storm, as the derailment of the immune system is called, and has developed CAR-T therapies that can be switched on and off. “You have to imagine that the genetically modified immune cell, the so-called T-cell, always has a link, a kind of coupling piece, so that it can dock onto the cancer cell in order to destroy it,” says Ehninger.
The coupling piece is a protein that is administered to the patient separately from the immune cells, with which the therapy can be stopped or continued as required. Because without the coupling piece, the immune cell cannot find its way to the cancer cell. Gemoab is currently researching two of these therapies in Dresden in the first clinical trial phase on humans.
The fact that Ehninger is now also working as Chief Medical Officer at the newly founded company AvenCell is due to an unusual investment deal. US investor Blackstone was interested in joining Gemoab, but also wanted to expand research in the direction of allogeneic therapies with cells from foreign donors. The US investor brought the gene scissors specialist Intellia from Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna on board. With the Crispr-Cas technology from Intellia, the donor cells are to be changed in the future so that they fit as many recipients as possible.
Another research location in the USA
AvenCell now has three major shareholders: the Blackstone Life Science Fund, which finances the new company based in Cambridge Massachusetts with the considerable sum of 250 million dollars, gene scissors specialist Intellia and Gerhard Ehninger’s Cellex. The Dresden-based Gemoab is now a subsidiary of AvenCell, and around 65 employees at the Dresden site are continuing their research work as before. Another research location is to be established in the USA.
The transaction has attracted a lot of attention in the venture capital industry. A “sensational development and financing structure,” says Olivier Litzka, partner at the life science fund company Andera Partners. Geomab is “another example of an ingenious cell therapy technology developed in Germany,” he says.
Various German biotech companies are currently working, for example, on developing cell therapies against solid tumors, i.e. malignant tissue growth: Biontech from Mainz, Immatics from Tübingen, Medigene from Munich and T-Knife from Berlin are among them.
The next step for Ehninger and his team is to build up the library with the donor’s immune cells. That should happen by the second half of next year. In addition, allogeneic cell therapies are to be developed not only against blood and lymph gland cancer, but also against solid tumors.
“We want to develop various coupling pieces so that the immune cells can also be brought to cancer cells in a targeted manner, for example in the lungs, prostate and breast,” says Ehninger. And these coupling pieces should also have a place in the company’s library so that the patients can be treated immediately with suitable donor cells and the required proteins.
But it should take a few years before that happens.
In any case, the retired medical professor does not want to retire yet. “It’s so exciting in cell therapy research and so stimulating to work with an international team that I can’t just stop,” says Ehninger.
More: $ 110 million for cell therapy cancer specialist T-Knife