I got several notices yesterday about very early results from a clinical trial for EB103, a T Cell treatment. Given the recent post here about other T-Cell related treatments, it caught my eye, since EB103 seems to work in a different way.
Interestingly, the notices I have gotten are from investing websites, not oncology websites. As I said, it's very early in the clinical trial process, so there might not be much to report just yet on oncology sites (indeed, the notices really describe results for just one patient). Maybe we'll hear more in a couple of months at the ASH conference.
It's also early enough in the process for EB103 that it's hard to find clear information about it, the kind that gets written for patients when it's closer to the possibility that patients will be given the treatment. So it took a little bit of work for me to understand how it works (and I'm not 100% confident that I do understand it, to be honest).
EB103 is described as "CD19-Redirected ARTEMIS T Cell." ARTEMIS stands for Antibody Redirected T Cells with Endogenous Modular Immune Signaling.
The key word for me in understanding this is "Endogenous." T cells are a type of immune cell. They float through the blood and look for things that don't belong there, like bacteria or viruses. They attach to antigens on the cell they are looking to get rid of. And Endogenous Antigen is a type of antigen that exists within a cell. (The opposite is an Exogenous antigen, something like a bacteria, which just floats along on its own, rather than getting into a cell.)
So EB103 works sort of like CAR-T and Bispecifics in that it uses a T Cell to go after cancer cells. It has two parts. One part looks for the CD19 protein on a cancer cell. But the other part is the innovative part. It is able to treat the cancer cell as an invader by looking for the Endogenous antigen, the way a T Cell would look for a virus. Because it has two targets, the EB103 can potentially be more effective.
Maybe more importantly, because it has that second part to it, the maker of EB103 says it is less likely to result in severe side effects like Cytokine Release Syndrome, one of the dangers of CAR-T for some patients.
Their website has a short animated video that describes all of this. As I said, it's still pretty technical right now, but interesting.
The notices I have gotten describe a patient who was given the treatment in a phase1/2 clinical trial and had a Complete Response. The patient has grade 3A Follicular Lymphoma with some grade 3B symptoms. he has already had three treatments and relapsed with each. He had no severe side effects.
This is definitely one to watch, and I'll be curious to see if they present at ASH in December with some updated results. It's very early, and it would be years before this treatment was available outside of clinical trials, so there isn't much to get excited about just yet.
But I also think it's a good example of some of the ways researchers are going beyond CAR-T and Bispecifics to use the immune system to fight cancer. And that broader trend is worth being excited about.
