Dr. Gail Roboz to Lead Clinical Trial in AML for Novel Immunotherapy, UCART123

In the summer of 2015, Weill Cornell Medical College and Cellectis, a French pharmaceutical company, announced a translational research collaboration for a new allogeneic chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy called UCART123. This “off-the-shelf” product is a directed immunotherapy for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive blood cancer. T cells are harvested from healthy donors and engineered to target the CD123 antigen, which is found on AML blast and stem cells, as well as tumor cells in another aggressive malignancy, blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN).

The clinical trial of UCART123 in AML is being led by principal investigator Dr. Gail J. Roboz, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Leukemia Program at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian. Translational scientific studies for the trial are being conducted in the laboratory of Dr. Monica Guzman, Associate Professor of Pharmacology in Medicine, also at Weill Cornell. Clinical research on UCART123 in BPDCN will be led by Dr. Naveen Pemmaraju and Dr. Hagop Kantarjian at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Stay tuned for more updates regarding the new phase 1 clinical trial for UCART123 to be initiated here at the Leukemia Program in the coming months.