A survey of cell therapy in China

In recent two years, with the approval of kit, Juno, Novartis and other companies' products, cell therapy gradually shows a hot state The clinical application of cytotherapy in China is also increasing, and the relevant investment and merger transactions are in a blowout state No comment on the future of cell therapy, but look at the current competitive landscape Fig 1 in 115 car cell therapy companies in the world, 53% of them are immunocytotherapy, and most start-ups have their own car products / projects At least 14 large biopharmaceutical companies have car cell projects, which are generally introduced and acquired (such as Pfizer, Amgen, shire, Zaiyuan, Johnson & Johnson, Ono, Takeda, etc.) In addition to the car cell project, 17 companies have other immunocytotherapies (such as NK cells, tcr-t, DC, etc.) under development One third of the companies are pre clinical, and two thirds are in clinical The two recent acquisitions in the field of cell therapy are Gilead's $11.9 billion acquisition of kit and celgene's $9 billion acquisition of Juno, which indicate the rapid growth of data from cell therapy companies However, due to the high price of cell therapy, there is no good sales performance Figure 2 the financing track of kite and Juno Table 1 the return multiples of investment in different stages of M & A at present, cell therapy is mainly used for advanced hematoma, and the real market demand may be solid tumor At present, kite can produce about 5000 car-t cells a year for the preparation and supply, and Fosun Kate in China can complete 500 The preparation of cell therapy products per person / year also indirectly determines the high price of the products From the data of 2017, the sales of cell therapy is not very ideal, and the production cost and cycle need to be reduced Kit company takes about 16-18 days from extracting the patient's cells to reinfusion car-t cells into the patient's body Compared with Novartis' 22-29 days and Juno's 24-day preparation time, kit is undoubtedly the fastest company to prepare car-t cell products At present, one of the ways to solve the problem is to cooperate with Ge in cell therapy production The number of Chinese cell therapy companies ranks first in the world, accounting for 42% of the world's share And these companies are all founded in the last five years (since 2012) Table 2 list of China's cell therapy companies: since December 2017, when Johnson & Johnson took over the legendary lcar-b38m car-t in Nanjing with us $350 million in cell immunotherapy, Kingsley's stock has soared, and people can see the opportunity of overtaking in the curve made in China In particular, on December 22, 2017, the National Center for drug review (CDE) issued the technical guidelines for research and evaluation of cell products (Trial), which requires that cell products will be processed in accordance with the drug review principles in the future Then two months later, car-t applications for clinical applications have sprung up, and the targets are relatively concentrated, most of them are cd19-cart Nanjing legend has also become the first cell therapy company to apply 。 Table 3 financing cases of some cell therapy companies in 2017 / 2018 Table 4 cell therapy has been declared in China However, cell therapy is different from other traditional drugs, and there are still many new problems to be solved At present, the target of cell therapy is not a problem, the main problem is the pre safety Last year, it was reported that Juno and kit had brain edema death events How to control the occurrence of cytokine storm has become the focus of clinicians For safety, Fosun Kate CEO Dr Wang Liqun stressed the importance of translational medicine The biomedical industry is entering the era of personalized treatment from the era of traditional biological medicine and chemical medicine In the future, cellular immunotherapy can cure cancer, including solid tumors, together with tumor immunotherapy However, more effective attempts are needed instead of following the trend It is hoped that the development will be based on the clinical orientation to avoid excessive waste of resources Looking at every company, the field is still in short supply of professional talents, and cell therapy still needs 2-3 years Four of the declared cell therapies this year have entered the clinical urgent need, and have obtained the priority review opportunity Following the continuous layout of PD-1 / PD-L1 R & D by domestic enterprises, Chinese enterprises have also caught up with the global pace in the field of car-t.