Poseida Therapeutics Chooses New CAR-T Candidate with Roche’s Help

Poseida Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: PSTX), a clinical-stage company focused on allogeneic cell therapies and genetic medicine, has announced the selection of a new development candidate as part of its collaboration with Roche. This milestone has resulted in a $15 million payment from Roche to Poseida.

The new candidate is an allogeneic dual CAR-T therapy designed to target specific antigens found in hematologic cancers, such as multiple myeloma. Utilizing Poseida's innovative non-viral transposon-based DNA delivery system, the therapy can incorporate genes for two complete chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) into T stem cell memory cells (TSCM), enhancing its therapeutic potential.

Poseida and Roche have expanded their partnership, which began in August 2022, to include three programs aimed at developing allogeneic CAR-T therapies for blood cancers. The flagship program, P-BCMA-ALLO1, is designed to target BCMA and has been granted Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation. This therapy is intended for adult patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma who have already undergone three or more treatment lines. Poseida is currently enrolling participants for the Phase 1b stage of the clinical trial. Additionally, the second program, P-CD19CD20-ALLO1, is an allogeneic dual CAR-T candidate that is now in Phase 1 development for B-cell malignancies.

Kristin Yarema, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of Poseida Therapeutics, said in a statement, "The nomination of a new development candidate builds on our collaboration with Roche and highlights the unique potential of our proprietary non-viral genetic engineering toolkit to create differentiated, TSCM-rich allogeneic CAR-T therapies targeting one or more antigens. Multiple myeloma is a common and incurable blood cancer with significant room for potent, safe and accessible novel agents to expand use across lines of therapy and sites of care. With compelling preclinical data supporting the target combination of this dual CAR-T, we look forward to advancing this program towards the clinic as a part of the collaboration. We also look forward to providing updates on our CAR-T programs and earlier-stage pipeline at Poseida's upcoming Cell Therapy R&D Day.”

Dr. Yarema commented, "Based on P-BCMA-ALLO1's promising differentiated safety and efficacy results established with the recent interim Phase 1 data presented at the IMS Annual Meeting in September and in collaboration with Roche, we look forward to continued patient enrollment in the Phase 1b trial. The new allogeneic dual CAR-T therapy candidate announced today will leverage the same proprietary Poseida GMP manufacturing platform that was used to create and advance P-BCMA-ALLO1.”