New commercial agreement for gene therapy at GOSH

Gene and cell therapies are the cutting-edge in clinical research for cancer treatments. They hold promise to offer personalised cancer treatments, including for rare forms that sadly affect children and young people. This year, GOSH opened new facilities for manufacturing gene and cell therapies. These facilities have increased our capacity to support development of cell and gene therapies from the very start in discovery research to clinical trials where therapies are tested in patients.

In a new agreement, GOSH will work with Leucid Bio, a biotechnology company, at the state-of-the-art cleanroom facilities at the Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children and provide quality assurance services required for manufacture of their gene therapy product, called LEU011.

LEU011 is a type of CAR T-cell therapy which reprogrammes these immune cells to recognise and destroy cancer cells. The company’s therapy has a particular structure on the cell surface that has been shown through early-stage research to work more effectively at targeting cancers than other types of CAR T-cell therapies.

Leucid Bio will submit for clinical trial approvals to trial LEU011, a type of gene therapy product over the next few months. In this first trial for patients, they hope to show that LEU011 improves outcomes and can save the lives of patients with solid tumours and blood cancers.

Read our information for patients and their families on CAR T-cell therapy.