The Imugene Limited (ASX: IMU) share price is pushing higher on Thursday morning.
At the time of writing, the clinical stage immuno-oncology company's shares are up 3.5% to 30.5 cents.
Why is the Imugene share price rising?
Investors have been bidding the Imugene share price higher today following the release of an announcement.
According to the release, Imugene has signed an exclusive strategic partnership with Nasdaq-listed clinical-stage biotechnology company, Celularity. The two companies will work together to develop off-the-shelf placental-derived allogeneic therapies.
The release explains that, as part of the partnership, Imugene and Celularity will initially collaborate to develop the combination of Imugene's CD19 oncolytic virus technology and Celularity's CD19 targeting allogeneic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cellular therapy, CyCART-19, for the treatment of solid tumours.
CyCART-19 is a placental-derived T-cell investigational therapy engineered with a CAR that is cryopreserved and will be available off-the-shelf.
"The potential to shift the cellular medicine paradigm"
Imugene's Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, Leslie Chong, said: "We believe the synergy between Celularity's placental derived cells and our OnCARlytic platform has the potential to shift the cellular medicine paradigm."
"In preclinical studies Celularity's cellular therapies have shown the ability to overcome limitations that have hindered other approaches, including increased proliferation and persistence in vivo, resistance to T-cell exhaustion and low immunogenicity, which allows for repeated dosing. These unique characteristics perfectly align with our vision for a combination treatment strategy, and we look forward to closely working together to bring this treatment strategy to the clinic and patients in need," she added.
This sentiment was echoed by Robert J. Hariri, M.D., Ph.D., the Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Celularity.
He said: "We are excited to initiate this research collaboration, which we believe will lay the foundation for a new approach to the treatment of solid tumors. Most solid tumors have variable targetable antigens, limiting CAR T-cell therapy efficacy. This treatment strategy with Imugene has the potential to apply to a new range of indications by enabling CD 19 targeted cellular medicine to expand from its current effective usage in CD19 positive lymphomas and leukemia and potentially become applicable to a variety of solid tumors through inducing uniform expression of CD19 in solid tumors."
The Imugene share price is up over 200% in 2021.
