While the allogeneic immune cell therapy business model has commercial and technical advantages over the autologous immune cell model, there are many problems with translating allogeneic cell therapies into commercial treatments. As allogeneic cell therapies are foreign to the patient, they will be rejected by the host immune system shortly after being administered. Since the allogeneic cells of current cell therapies are designed to provide the therapeutic effects, their rejection by the host will neutralize any effects of the therapy.
To delay rejection, many allogeneic cell therapy developers require pre-treatment of patients with chemotherapy, matched tissue donors or use of other powerful drugs that act to suppress the host immune system sufficient to delay rejection and prolong the persistence of the foreign allogeneic cells. However, when allogeneic cells are allowed to persist in the host for too long, they can attack normal cells causing a highly toxic and often lethal side-effect called graft vs. host disease (GVHD).
To avoid GVHD, our cell therapy and CAR-T competitors are experimenting with using elaborate genetic engineering techniques, such as adding suicide genes or knocking out expression of certain foreign molecules in the allogeneic cells together with pre-treatment immunosuppressive strategies. By contrast, our AlloStim® allogeneic immune cells are non-genetically manipulated and administered without any pre-treatment immunosuppression.
Uniquely, our intentionally mis-matched AlloStim® cells are designed to be rejected by the patient’s immune system. AlloStim® cells do not directly mediate immune effects such as killing tumors, they instead act to modulate and re-model the host immune system. This unique feature of AlloStim® distinguishes our cell therapy from all current autologous and allogeneic cell therapies currently in clinical use or under development. The rejection of AlloStim® causes changes to the patient’s own resident immune cells, so they become capable of orchestrating a cascade of immune events which result in immune protection against existing disease or preventing disease. The immune modulating effects of AlloStim® rejection are able to be used to elicit effective immune responses against cancer and pathogens and to re-model weakened immune systems, such as those of the elderly, that fail to protect against cancers and pathogens.