Upstart Notch Therapeutics plans to commercialize industrial-scale allogeneic gene-edited T cell therapies to deliver cost-effective treatments to patients with cancer or immune deficiencies.
Incubated at Toronto’s Center for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine, Notch was founded by Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, University of Toronto (UT), Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners and CCRM. With Lumira Ventures is an additional investor, Notch is actively pursuing industry partnerships.
“This technology is very promising and might be used to create therapies to treat some of our greatest medical challenges, like cancer, autoimmune diseases and organ transplant rejection. It’s also the first and only method that can reconstitute immune systems,” Dr. Andy Smith, president and CEO of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, said in a statement.
“Finally having options to target these high-impact areas for our patients is what we mean when we say we are inventing the future of health care,” he added.
Notch’s technology was developed at the labs of Dr. Juan Carlos Zúñiga-Pflücker, senior scientist in biological sciences at Sunnybrook, and chair of the Department of Immunology at UT; and Dr. Peter Zandstra, professor, Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at UT and director, School of Biomedical Engineering and Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia.
