Empowered Patient Podcast Universal Approach to Cell Therapy Using SNAP-CAR with Dave Mehalick Coeptis Therapeutics
Dave Mehalick, Chairman, Co-Founder, President, and CEO of Coeptis Therapeutics, focuses on developing cell therapies for oncology and respiratory diseases. They aim to create a universal cell therapy that can be used for various types of cancer and move it from a later line of treatment to a frontline therapy. The company has developed a unique CAR therapy called SNAP-CAR, which utilizes off-the-shelf cells and a targeting mechanism to attack cancer cells at different points, making it difficult for the cells to mutate and evade treatment. Coeptis is conducting clinical trials using its cell generation platform, including a trial for COVID-19 patients and a trial for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) patients.
Dave explains, "Coeptis is a cell therapy company mainly focused on oncology, although we have recently broadened into respiratory disease. And really, the prime mission of the company would be to what we would term universalized cell therapy to make it available for the masses. Right now, cell therapy has to be very highly targeted to certain people. It’s extremely expensive. With a lot of the technologies that Coeptis has brought together under one roof, we feel it will solve a lot of those issues and make it not only available to mostly all people but also move it from a third, fourth, and fifth-line therapy for different issues, all the way up to a frontline therapy."
"We were able to license an amazing cutting-edge, next-generation CAR therapy developed at the University of Pittsburgh called SNAP-CAR. If you are familiar with CAR therapies such as CAR T, which have developed over the years, I believe it was initially founded at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, CAR T therapy has been rather successful in being able to attack previously thought of incurable cancers and create great results for patients."
"The interesting thing about a CAR T is that each CAR T is a very highly specialized cellular structure that is designed to target a very specific point on a very specific cancer. What happens with that is when you devise it, it will be used for this exact area. And what the scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and in collaboration with Coeptis now have designed is a CAR, which is the cellular CAR, the construct that is universal. What I mean by that is it’s not initially targeting anything on a cell. We’ve created the CAR that we attach to the effector cell, whether it be a natural killer or a T cell, a macrophage, etc. However, CAR does not instantly attack anything until we use a targeting mechanism. In this case, we’re utilizing monoclonal antibodies right now that fuses with the CAR and then pulls that into attack itself. So why is that important?"
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