CARGO Therapeutics’ mission is to outsmart cancer by developing the next generation of transformational CAR T-cell therapies to impact patients worldwide. Our goal is to become a fully integrated, leading cell therapy.
Despite the curative potential of cell therapies, we believe these treatments are not readily available to many of the patients who could benefit from them due to manufacturing challenges, supply constraints, unpredictable turnaround time and other logistical challenges.
The number of cancers with effective CAR T-cell therapies is limited and the total number of patients who have received these therapies represents only a small fraction of potentially eligible cancer patients. Today, five years after CAR T-cells were first approved to treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) and acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), over 40,000 U.S. patients may be eligible to be treated by CD19 CAR T-cell therapies, but fewer than 3,800 patients are expected to receive such treatment in 2023. Furthermore, resistance mechanisms in hematologic malignancies can limit the strength and quality of T-cell response and contribute to disease progression, including loss or down-regulation of target antigen expression, loss of costimulation and limited CAR T-cell persistence. CARGO’s programs, platform technologies, and manufacturing strategy are designed to directly address the limitations of approved cell therapies, including limited durability of effect, safety concerns and unreliable supply. Our solution involves engineering CAR T-cells with genetic “cargo” designed to enhance the ability to recognize and kill cancer cells in a patient’s body.
Our lead program, CRG-022, is a novel CAR T-cell product candidate designed to address resistance mechanisms by targeting CD22, a tumor antigen that is expressed in a vast majority of B-cell malignancies. We are currently evaluating CRG-022 in a potentially pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial in patients with large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL) whose disease relapsed or was refractory (R/R) to CD19 CAR T-cell therapy. We also plan to evaluate CRG-022 in patients at earlier stages of disease, including LBCL and other hematologic malignancies.
Beyond our lead program, we are leveraging our proprietary cell engineering platform technologies to develop a pipeline of programs that incorporate multiple transgene therapeutic “cargo” designed to enhance CAR T-cell persistence and trafficking to tumor lesions, as well as to help safeguard against tumor resistance and T-cell exhaustion.
Our founders are pioneers and world-class experts in CAR T-cell therapy, and its team has significant experience and success developing, manufacturing, launching and commercializing oncology and cell therapy products.
