Lonza and Triumvira Immunologics announced that the first patient has been dosed with Triumvira’s investigational T-cell antigen coupler (TAC-T cell) adoptive immunotherapy, TAC01-HER2, in development for the treatment of HER2-overexpressing cancers.
 
Triumvira’s TAC01-HER2, which harnesses natural T cell activation, was manufactured on Lonza’s proprietary Cocoon Platform at C3i Center Inc in Montréal, Canada. The Cocoon Platform is an automated and closed platform for patient-scale cell therapy manufacturing, designed to overcome manufacturing challenges associated with patient-scale personalized medicines.
 
This collaboration aims to bring novel immunotherapies to patients for the treatment of HER2-overexpressing cancers. The Cocoon Platform will enable manufacturing efficiencies, robustness, and cost reductions by decreasing the necessary manpower, time, and space requirements and ultimately allow the delivery of potentially curative cellular immunotherapies to more patients, at a higher quality and for a reduced cost. From the start of the collaboration, Triumvira’s TAC-T cell treatment was efficiently translated to Lonza’s Cocoon Platform, involving technology transfer to C3i and engineering runs, to support an investigational new drug (IND) submission in under a year.
 
Eytan Abraham, vice president Personalized Medicine, Lonza, commented, “Treating the first HER2-overexpressing cancer patient at MD Anderson with Triumvira’s therapy demonstrates the potential of the Cocoon Platform to manufacture therapies at third party manufacturing sites using a decentralized model. The fact that the timeline for moving a fully automated manufacturing process to IND submission using the Cocoon Platform at a new manufacturing site was less than a year demonstrates the ability to truly accelerate timelines from lab to clinic using the Cocoon Platform. Our goal remains to enable partners to provide personalized immunotherapies at a lower cost, higher quality, and more quickly to critically ill patients.”
 
Paul Lammers, president and CEO, Triumvira, added, “We’re proud to be the first company in the US to dose a patient with a cell therapy manufactured on the Cocoon Platform, which is an innovative and elegant solution that addresses challenges of manufacturing autologous cell therapies. Our proprietary TAC-T technology combined with Lonza’s manufacturing expertise enables us to deliver a high-quality and truly personalized cell therapy and manufacturing process that may one day be used at the point-of-care. We look forward to our continued partnership with Lonza and C3i as we move forward with the clinical trial of TAC01-HER2.”
 
Louisa Petropoulos, CEO, C3i, commented, “C3i Center Inc. is founded on the principle that Canadian breakthroughs in cell and gene therapy for serious diseases like cancer should remain in Canada for the benefit of our health and economy. Experimental treatments like TAC01-HER2 won’t become a reality unless we can produce and refine cells quickly, reliably and affordably, and that is what an automated closed system like the Cocoon Platform brings to the table. We are thrilled to put the Cocoon Platform to the test as part of our suite of cutting-edge technologies as we support this critical clinical trial.”
 
The TAC01-HER2 clinical trial is actively enrolling patients across numerous clinical study sites in the US.