Prime Medicine considers focus on autoimmune diseases for CAR-T, CEO says

Prime Medicine is considering developing cell therapies for autoimmune diseases and will likely look for a partner for cancer cell therapies, CEO Keith Gottesdiener said during a talk at the Goldman Sachs Global Healthcare Conference on Monday.

By doing so, the biotech would join a growing list of academic groups and companies creating CAR-T therapies for autoimmune conditions like lupus. CAR-T therapies were first developed for cancer and have been transformative for patients who are able to access them.

“We probably believe at the moment — this is not a final decision — that we don’t currently have the expertise to really compete in a very crowded CAR-T space, no matter how powerful our technology is in oncology,” Gottesdiener said during the fireside talk. “You have to pick the right niche. You have to have the right relationship with investigators to get the patients, and you make one misstep in oncology these days, with the competition, you’re done.”

“It would be better to partner with someone who has the expertise and let them carry it forward,” he said of developing cell therapies for cancer, adding that NK cell therapies were also a possibility.

At the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy’s annual meeting in May, Prime presented preclinical data on CD19 CAR-T cells that were developed via its platform PASSIGE, which uses prime editing to insert longer genes, that showed a reduction in tumor size in mice.

David Liu

Prime Medicine was co-founded by the Broad Institute’s David Liu and Andrew Anzalone, who’s now head of the biotech’s prime editing platform. The company is working to develop medicines based on prime editing, a next-generation form of CRISPR editing that can make small changes in the genome without needing to cut the DNA all the way. The technology is still in its early days, with the first research published in 2019. To date, no prime-edited medicines have been tested in humans.

“We do have a lot of expertise in autoimmune and other kinds of immunological diseases. We haven’t made any decisions yet, so I don’t want to predict where we’re going,” Gottesdiener said. “But we’re certainly giving a lot of thought about whether we can use that same kind of technology to explore places in that arena, which once again may not be so easily reachable with the kinds of CAR-Ts most others are making.”

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