Stamford”™s Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy, the nation”™s only nonprofit dedicated exclusively to cell and gene therapies for cancer, has granted $1.3 million to three scientists exploring gene therapy to tackle glioblastoma (brain cancer), sarcoma (bone cancer) and ovarian cancer.
The grants will be used to study immunotherapy and virotherapy in the treatment of those diseases.
“We have big hopes for these grants,” said AGCT CEO and President John Walter. “ACGT was one of the first funders to support Dr. Carl June”™s work at the University of Pennsylvania in successfully treating leukemia with gene therapy when it was still deemed ”˜risky”™ science. The recent FDA approval of the first gene therapy treatment to come out of this research, Kymriah, validates the promise of this science.
“With these three new clinical investigator grants,” he continued, “we hope to see similar results with immunotherapy and virotherapy in treating hard-to-combat solid tumor cancers.”
Receiving the grants were Drs. Nori Kasahara of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami, Seth Pollack at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and Daniel Powell Jr. at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
ACGT has issued a total of 55 grants totaling more than $28 million.
