Ginkgo Bioworks and WARF partner for GD2 CAR T-Cell therapies

Ginkgo Bioworks and The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation – WARF -, which has a mission of supporting research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, announced a partnership to leverage Ginkgo’s proprietary high-throughput combinatorial CAR discovery and screening platform with the aim of discovering next generation GD2 CAR T-cell therapies with improved persistence, proliferation, fitness, and other functional properties to improve efficacy for the treatment of solid tumors. Through this partnership, Ginkgo will collaborate with the University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Professor Krishanu Saha, as principal investigator and Christian Capitini as co-PI. The two have collaborated on the development of a GD2 CAR T-cell therapeutic candidate for the treatment of neuroblastoma, a type of cancer generally affecting young children. Under this collaboration, Ginkgo will use its pooled CAR screening platform to design and characterize novel intracellular signaling domains that prevent the exhaustion of T-cells in the GD2 solid tumor context. In addition, Ginkgo and WARF plan to collaborate on the development of a pooled in vivo screening platform to advance novel CAR discovery further.