Sorrento to Provide Corporate Update, Including DAR-T Cell Therapy Advances, at LEERINK Global Healthcare Conference

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 27, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: SRNE, "Sorrento"), announced today that Dr. Henry Ji, Chairman and CEO, will present at the 9th Annual LEERINK Partners Global Healthcare Conference (Lotte New York Palace Hotel, New York) on Thursday Feb 27 at 11:00-11:25 AM (Presentation Room Adams).

Key updates:

• Both RTX Phase 1b Cancer Pain and Phase 1b Osteoarthritis (OA) Knee Pain studies have completed initial enrollment with preliminary positive results: no dose limiting toxicities observed and significant efficacy signal confirmed.
• Allogeneic “Off-the-Shelf” Dimeric Antigen Receptor-T (DAR-T) cell therapy products targeting hematologic cancer targets (BCMA, CD38, CD20, CD123) and solid tumor targets (GD2, CEA, EGFR, and many others) have been successfully produced.
• Proprietary DAR construct for coronavirus targeting, including COVID-19, has been successfully generated; COVID-19 targeting DAR-T cells and DAR-NK cells will be produced next in Sorrento’s cGMP facilities (San Diego) as part of the IND-enabling package necessary to promptly initiate human clinical studies.

DAR-T specific developments:

Sorrento’s proprietary DAR structure offers potential advantages over the conventional CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) structure by:

• increasing specificity and functionality of the DAR-T cells as compared to CAR-T cells due to higher inherent stability of the Fab fragment used in the DAR
• potentially reducing the clinical dose due to increased functional activity (preclinical data)

In addition to the proprietary DAR structure, Sorrento’s proprietary non-viral knockout-knockin (KOKI) manufacturing approach offers several potential benefits over virus-based transduction currently used for CAR-T therapies:

• site-specific integration of transgenes into pre-selected loci in the T cell genome
• enhanced clonal expansion of the DAR-T cells
• streamlined method for transgene construct production without the need for laborious and time-consuming virus production, release and validation processes, resulting in a shorter research and development timelines for IND-enabling activities. 

Combining those approaches, the allogeneic DAR-T products could potentially have the following major advantages over current autologous CAR-T therapy technologies: