JAX Expands Korean Collaboration Via Immuno-Oncology Center
This article was originally published in PharmAsia News
Executive Summary
Following its partnership with Seoul National University for a cancer genomics project, the US-based Jackson Laboratory is expanding its collaboration with South Korea, this time by agreeing to set up a cancer immunotherapy research center with Ewha Womans University, supported by a government grant.
SEOUL - The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) of the US and Ewha Womans University will jointly set up a cancer immunotherapy research center in 2017, a move that could push up South Korea's research level in the field and further expand JAX's collaborations with the country in oncology.
The new facility, which will be called the Ewha-JAX International Research Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, has recently been selected as a new South Korean government project that will receive a grant of up to KRW3.6bn ($3.1m), or KRW600m each year.
Professor Kim Jae-sang and Professor Lee Sang-hyuk of Ewha Womans University, as well as Professor Charles Lee, director of The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, will participate in the project.
Over the past few years, cancer immunotherapy has been drawing strong interest from the global pharma industry. The approach, which emerged after anticancer strategies such as surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy and molecular-targeted therapy, is seen as a new paradigm as it raises survival rates but with fewer side effects.
According to Hyundai Securities, cancer therapies, particularly cancer immunotherapies, accounted for 40% of the pipelines multinational pharma firms have been acquiring since the beginning of 2014. They have been spending a large amount of money in third-generation cancer immunotherapies, particularly in the CAR-T area.
Some South Korean firms, such as SillaJen Inc. (Also see "SillaJen’s Novel HCC Therapy Set For Phase III" - Scrip, 23 Apr, 2015.) and Green Cross Cell (Also see "Green Cross Cell Unveils Positive Progress In HCC Immunotherapy" - Scrip, 25 Aug, 2015.) have recently made some progress in this area.
But the country's research capabilities in this field have largely been weak due to difficulties in developing animal models that can replace humans and in efficiently studying response and resistance to anticancer therapies, said the university.
Expected Gains
Ewha Womans University’s research team has been jointly developing humanized mice, which are NSG mice engrafted with human hematopoetic stem cells, and cancer therapies after reaching a partnership with the Jackson Laboratory last year.
The latest project is expected to help bring much progress in standardizing information on the response effects of cancer immunotherapies by integrating Jackson's humanized mice development system and Ewha Womans University affiliated hospital's cancer genome research technology, the university said.
Looking ahead, the research team plans to make clinical applications to actual patients at the hospital and to come up with a global clinical collaboration research model to become a leading international research center for cancer immunotherapy.
Earlier this year, the Jackson Laboratory said that, in collaboration with Seoul National University, it would receive a five-year, $7.5m grant from the South Korean government for a large-scale cancer genomics project employing the latest sequencing technology and special JAX mouse models that can host human tumors.
During the first phase of the grant from 2013 to 2015, the JAX and Seoul National University’s research team will collect and store tumors from patients with gastric, breast, colon, lung and rare cancers, and sequence and determine the genomic signatures of those cancers.
During the grant's second phase from 2016 to 2017, the researchers will take the project to the clinic, developing a personalized anticancer drug screening system and establishing a clinical trial network for individualized medicinal screening.
The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, non-profit biomedical research institution based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a facility in Sacramento, California and a new genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Connecticut.