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Australia's Imugene has entered a strategic co-development collaboration with Chinese startup JW Therapeutics to evaluate a novel combination immunotherapy for patients with advanced, hard-to-treat solid tumours.
The partnership will investigate the use of Imugene’s oncolytic virus CF33-CD19 (onCARlytics) together with JW’s CD19-directed autologous CAR-T cell therapy, Carteyva®, in an effort to extend the benefits of CD19 CAR-T technology beyond blood cancers into solid tumours.
Under the agreement, the companies will first undertake a series of preclinical in vitro and in vivo studies, before progressing to a Phase 1 investigator-initiated trial in China, to be conducted at leading CAR-T clinical centres.
The therapeutic concept is based on a first-in-class “mark and kill” strategy: Imugene’s CF33-CD19 oncolytic virus is used to infect tumour cells and induce CD19 expression on their surface, effectively “marking” them. This engineered CD19 expression is then exploited by CD19-directed CAR-T cells, such as Carteyva®, which can recognise and attack the now CD19-positive solid tumour cells.
The collaboration brings together JW’s established commercial CAR-T infrastructure and experience with Imugene’s clinical-stage onCARlytics platform, with the goal of generating robust preclinical and early clinical data to guide further development. Both companies see this as a potential step-change in making solid tumours targetable by CD19 CAR-T therapies, addressing a key challenge in the broader application of cell-based immunotherapies.
It sets defined go/no-go decision points and milestones to maintain disciplined capital allocation while preserving strategic flexibility.
