“We are proud and delighted that our innovative proposal was selected and rewarded by Eurostars funding. The synergistic combination of our consortium technologies will definitely provide a breakthrough in this exhilarating field of immunotherapy. We look forward to a fruitful collaboration and successful outcome” said Olivier Zelphati, CEO of OZ Biosciences Sas.
Eurostars, a European joint programme, co-funded from the national budgets of several EUREKA countries and by the European Union through Horizon 2020 has awarded, through a highly-competitive selection process, the Project “A novel modified natural killer (NK) cell immunotherapy for the treatment of solid tumours” – MODIFY-NK.
The consortium composed of Glycostem Therapeutics BV (The Netherlands), YUMAB GmbH (Germany), Explicyte (France) and OZ Biosciences SAS (France) will deliver a novel cell-based therapy to treat solid tumours with chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) expressing allogeneic (i.e. from a patient independent donor) natural killer (NK) cells. These CARs strongly improve solid tumour targeting and killing potential. The efficacy of this clinical grade CAR-NK cell product will be validated in a preclinical solid tumour model and the therapy will be ready for clinical studies within 24 months after completion of this project.