Novel Oncology Biotherapeutics: CAR-T Cell Therapy

The market for novel modalities has increased in demand and innovation. Sarah Hein, co-founder and CEO of March Biosciences, sees this as an exciting time for oncology drug development, including novel therapies and retargeting classic modalities. “But where I've really been excited, both for this company and my prior company, is really around the emergence and impact of immunotherapies. Immunotherapies allow you to retarget the immune system itself and harness the power of the immune system to directly fight the cancer within the body,” Hein says. “And for the first time, you are seeing curative, potentially, responses a large number of patients who are achieving long-term, durable remissions. Some of these are usually just uninhibiting the immune system, but where we've really been leaning into is the cell therapies, where you can engineer and turbocharge those cells directly to target a cancer.”

Hein also gave us an update on March Bioscience’s orphan drug, MB-105, which is a CD 5 targeted CAR-T cell therapy currently in a Phase II trial for the treatment of T cell lymphoma. “The majority of those diseases are derived from your B cells. And there's a lot of therapies available for those patients all the way up to and including these very powerful cell therapies,” Hein says. “Unfortunately, for the T cell malignancies, what we see is there really is no standard of care for these patients after the disease becomes relapsed or refractory to primary care, and so unfortunately, the prognosis is very, very poor, and there's a number of challenges that have held back the development of cell therapies for these diseases.”

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About the speaker

Sarah Hein, PhD, is the CEO and Co-Founder of March Biosciences, a clinical-stage cell-therapy company targeting challenging hematological malignancies. Prior, she was the founding Entrepreneur in Residence for the Texas Medical Center Innovation Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics (TMCi ACT). She was the Vice President of Operations at Courier Therapeutics, a cancer immunotherapy startup acquired by Valo Health. She was also Director of Research at Resonant Therapeutics, an antibody therapeutics platform technology company. She began at Mercury Fund as a Venture Fellow directly after graduating with her PhD in Molecular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine.