Novartis, Penn In Immunotherapy Pact

Novartis has teamed with the University of Pennsylvania to bring chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer to market. Penn’s CAR technology recodes a patient’s own T cells to express proteins found on the patient’s tumor. When reintroduced into the patient’s bloodstream, those engineered T cells can bind to and kill tumor cells. Novartis gains access to CART-19, an immunotherapy that has shown promise in a pilot study of patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The partners will build the Center for Advanced Cellular Therapies on the Penn campus in Philadelphia, where they plan to discover, develop, and manufacture adoptive T-cell immunotherapies.