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September 1, 2020

Woodbridge company’s product seeks to make immunotherapy safer

PHOTO: Contributed  Uday Khire
By Natalie Missakian

A Woodbridge bioscience company said it has developed a product that can act as an on/off switch for certain immunotherapy treatments, raising hopes that it can one day be used to eliminate toxic side effects that often accompany such therapies.

Uday Khire, founder and CEO of Cheminpharma LLC, said his company’s Aquashield 1, or AS-1, was able to control CAR T cell activity in mice. 

The findings, based on research Khire conducted with scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, were published in July in the scientific journal Molecular Therapy.

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, better known as CAR T, involves genetically engineering a patient’s immune cells to see and attack their tumor. The immunotherapy has been a life-saver for many cancer patients, but also can come with toxic and sometimes deadly side effects.

That’s because while synthetic drugs break down once they enter the body, CAR T cells are a living therapy and are more difficult to control, Khire explains. 

AS-1 is a small molecule ligand that binds to the engineered proteins and can regulate their expression, essentially acting as a remote control, according to Khire.

“Controlling the expression and ability to dial down CARs in the body is a much-needed improvement of CAR technologies,” Khire explained. 

Khire said his company’s work builds on research done by Tom Wandless at Stanford University. 

He said AS-1 is an improvement of technology Wandless developed to control CAR T cells. Because the molecule is water soluble, it can be administered to mice and, eventually, humans. 

Although the research is still in the early stages, he said AS-1 is the first small molecule ligand to show efficacy in controlling CAR T expression in mice. 

Controlling toxic side effects of immunotherapy is just one of many potential applications of the technology, Khire said. The molecule can also be used by biotechnology companies for preclinical studies of CAR T cell biology. 

Khire, a former Bayer chemist, founded Cheminpharma at Science Park in 2007 and moved the company to a 5,000-square-foot lab and office space in Woodbridge around two years ago.

The company provides products and preclinical drug discovery services to the biotech industry, specializing in medicinal chemistry, custom synthesis, scale-up and chemistry process research. It also develops reagents and tools for research.

Khire said he is interested in collaborating with other biotech companies to bring AS-1 into human trials.

Contact Natalie Missakian at news@newhavenbiz.com

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