On Sept. 16, 2019, Healio reported the 7-year research and development alliance between Novartis and the University of Pennsylvania has concluded, with both organizations entering into a new, more limited agreement for the development of chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies.

Penn originally teamed with Novartis in 2012 after researchers from Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center published their findings on the use of CAR T cells to treat patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The original pact, in collaboration with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, resulted in the development of tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah, Novartis), the first gene therapy approved to treat cancer.

The FDA approved tisagenlecleucel in August 2017 for treatment of children and young adults with relapsed or refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The CAR T-cell therapy received additional FDA approval in May 2018 for patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma, including patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, high-grade B-cell lymphoma, or DLBCL arising from follicular lymphoma who received two or more lines of systemic therapy.

Penn and Novartis will continue to collaborate on CAR T-cell projects but with a more limited focus, allowing the University of Pennsylvania to seek out other partners to develop the technology resulting from its research.

The new alliance between Novartis and Penn will focus on four clinical trials: one in multiple myeloma using two different CAR T-cell therapies; one trial that combines CAR T-cell therapy with pembrolizumab (Keytruda, Merck) for glioblastoma; and two new CAR T-cell trials that target CD22 and CD123 for hematological malignancies.