Novartis AG Puts Cancer Hopes on 4 Star Scientists Poached From Harvard Last Year

March 1, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

BASEL, Switzerland – In 2015, Novartis tapped four scientists from Harvard University as part of a gamble to drive cancer research and become more competitive with other pharma companies, particularly when it comes to the development of CAR-T therapies.

Novartis hopes to develop new cancer drugs, particularly as it faces diminishing revenues from its cancer drug, Gleevec, which is facing increased generic competition here in the United States.

Last year, Novartis shuttered its five-year-old Cell and Gene Therapy Unit, which sent shockwaves through the CAR-T community as some believed it to be a signal the company was abandoning the immuno-therapy research program for good. This certainly wasn’t the case and in December the company announced its experimental CAR-T therapy CLT019 sent 82 percent of patients’ blood cancer into remission, according to interim data presented at the American Society of Hematology meeting. That data puts Novartis in line to hit its 2017 goal to seek regulatory approval for its pediatric leukemia CAR-T therapy, CTL019. The four Harvard researchers were brought on to help Novartis meet that goal and spur on other research. The company is planning to seek regulatory approval for CTL019 in early 2017.

One area of challenge for Novartis is the development of PD-1 and PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor drugs, Peter Hammerman of Harvard, told Reuters in an interview. The lack of one of those classes of drugs is something that hurts Novartis when it comes to competing with the likes of Merck or Roche , Hammerman said. Novartis is working on developing the checkpoint inhibitors. Reuters said Hammerman and Novartis researchers are looking at 12 potential treatments, some of which it acquired through a purchase of CoStim, Reuters said.

Hammerman was not the only Harvard scientist Novartis poached over the past years. In December 2015, Novartis tapped Harvard researcher James “Jay” Bradner as the head of the company’s Institutes for Biomedical Research. Additionally Novartis hired Jeff Engelman from Harvard to run its cancer drug discovery unit and Glenn Dranoff, who is leading Novartis’ immuno-oncology efforts.

While Novartis is behind in the PD-1 race, it may also fall behind Kite Pharma in CAR-T development. While Novartis’ experimental drug shows great promise, Kite’s CAR-T candidate axicabtagene ciloleucel (previously referred to as KTE-C19) met its primary endpoints in a critical study. That company is preparing to seek regulatory approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as well as the European Medicines Agency. Axicabtagene ciloleucel is an investigational therapy in which a patient's T-cells are engineered to target the antigen CD19, a protein expressed on the cell surface of B-cell lymphomas and leukemias, and redirect the T-cells to kill cancer cells.