Better late than never for Maxcyte’s one-day CAR-T approach

It is just as well that Maxcyte has an electroporation service business as well as an R&D operation, otherwise its past two years would have been pretty quiet. It has taken that long for Carma, its flagship CAR-T technology, to get off the ground. The group’s 2016 listing in London was a bet on a mesothelin-directed CAR-T project using Carma, a trial of which was to begin last year. The US IND for this asset, now coded MCY-M11, was filed last November, and has only just been approved, a delay Trinity Delta analysts put down to the FDA’s cautious stance regarding novel cell and gene therapies. There might also have been questions over mesothelin – a notoriously dirty target expressed in several healthy tissues. Unlike conventional CAR-T, Carma uses mRNA electroporation rather than viral transfection, and takes fresh apheresis product, with no cell expansion; the aim is to cut manufacturing time from several weeks to a day, and generate transient CAR-T cells that need to be redosed. More details about the trial, in ovarian cancer and peritoneal mesothelioma, will presumably emerge before it begins in the second half.