Celyad, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of CAR-T cell-based therapies, has successfully administered CYAD-01 produced with the OptimAb manufacturing process to a patient in the Phase I DEPLETHINK trial.
 
Jean-Pierre Latere, chief operating officer of Celyad, said, “The dosing of the first patient with CYAD-01 manufactured with the OptimAb process marks another important milestone for our company. The OptimAb manufacturing process has shown exciting activity in preclinical models and we believe that the integration of the manufacturing process into our autologous relapsed/refractory acute myeloid leukemia program should help us to improve upon the initial signals we have observed to date with CYAD-01. We look forward to reporting preliminary data from patients enrolled in the DEPLETHINK trial treated with CYAD-01 produced with the OptimAb process by the end of the year.”

CYAD-01 is an investigational CAR-T therapy in which a patient’s T cells are engineered to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) based on NKG2D, a receptor expressed on natural killer (NK) cells that binds to eight stress-induced ligands expressed on tumor cells.

The OptimAb manufacturing process utilizes a shortened cell culture and incorporates a selective PI3K inhibitor, resulting in a product that is enriched for T cells with a memory-like phenotype. Preclinical data demonstrate that CYAD-01 produced using the OptimAb manufacturing process drives improved anti-tumor activity in an aggressive acute myeloid leukemia (AML) model compared to CYAD-01 produced with the previous mAb manufacturing process.