GC Cell Advances Development of Innovative Drug for T-cell Lymphoma

[Asia Economy Reporter Chunhee Lee] GC Cell (GC Cell) recently announced on the 28th that it has added the T-cell lymphoma therapeutic candidate ‘CT205A (CD5 CAR-NK)’ to its pipeline.

CT205A is an allogeneic umbilical cord blood-derived NK cell therapy equipped with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) targeting CD5, which is expressed in T-cell lymphoma. It was developed using GC Cell’s proprietary CAR-NK platform and is evaluated to have significant advantages in terms of manufacturing efficiency and expected fewer side effects compared to autologous CAR-T therapies.

In particular, T-cell lymphoma is a rare and intractable disease with high unmet needs, as there are almost no treatment options compared to B-cell lymphoma. Combination chemotherapy such as CHOP is used as the standard treatment, but it often does not lead to actual disease remission, and patients who fail first-line treatment or relapse have a poor prognosis with a median survival of about 5.8 months.

Currently, an alternative commercialized treatment option is the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) ‘Brentuximab Vedotin,’ which targets CD30 expressed on some T cells. However, since only a subset of T-cell lymphomas express CD30, its indications have been considered limited. In T-cell lymphoma, CD5 expression is significantly higher than CD30, making CD5 a more universally applicable target than CD30.

Additionally, a CD5 CAR-T therapy is under early clinical development. However, when approached with CAR-T, there is concern about fratricide, where CAR-T cells kill each other during culture because normal T cells also express CD5. This requires the cumbersome process of removing endogenously expressed CD5 before reintroducing CD5 CAR. Moreover, autologous CAR-T therapies have limitations such as the possibility of gene introduction into patient cancer cells, leading to malignant CAR-T contamination, and the potential induction of T-cell aplasia in the body.

However, the CD5 CAR-NK using umbilical cord blood-derived NK cells added to GC Cell’s pipeline is explained to have fewer such concerns. Unlike T cells, NK cells do not express CD5, so fratricide during culture and in the body does not occur, and side effects caused by T-cell aplasia in the body are predicted to be limited.

Min Bokyung, head of GC Cell’s Cell Therapy Research Institute, said, “NK cell therapies are a new modality that overcomes the limitations of existing CAR-T therapies and are growing rapidly every year,” adding, “We will strive to make ‘CT205A’ a new treatment option for patients suffering from intractable diseases.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.