Genexine said Monday that it signed an agreement with Toolgen to co-develop and commercialize CAR-NK cell gene therapy using the latter’s CRISPR/Cas9 technology.

The two companies will co-own patent rights, utility model rights, trademark rights, and R&D data resulting from their co-development at a 5:5 equity ratio. They will also equally shoulder the cost incurred for the patent application, revision, registrations, and maintenance.

Genexine will make the most of Toolgen’s genetic scissors technology to develop new cell gene therapy to cure incurable diseases and expand its strategic pipelines.

CAR-NK cell gene therapy is an anticancer drug -- homogeneous natural killer (NK) cells whose immunity efficacy is strengthened through genetic manipulation – administered to patients.

Unlike the CAR-T cell treatment that has to utilize the patient’s own T cell, the production of CAR-NK therapy is much cheaper, and mass production is also possible because NK cells could be abstracted from ready-made cell strain or induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC). NK cells also can attack a wide variety of cancer cells, aside from targets introduced by CAR technology, as they have perception ability and offensive power.

Toolgen has confirmed that it could improve anticancer and immunity capacity through gene-editing of not only CAR-T, TCR-T but CAR-NK and various other anticancer immunocytes.

“Genexine will make the best use of Toolgen’s CRISPR/Cas9 technology to develop new drugs of gene therapy to cure incurable diseases. This co-development MOU will be its start,” Genexine CEO Sung Young-chul said. “NK cell gene therapy, which is rapidly emerging as the next-generation anticancer immunotherapy, has cost advantages. By developing new drugs through cooperation with Toolgen, we will bring about a paradigm change on the anticancer treatment market.”

Toolgen Kim Young-ho also said, “Toolgen had put in a lot of effort to apply gene-editing technology to cell therapies, such as CAR-T and CAR-NK, and has recently produced successful results.”

Kim added that if the two companies develop global blockbuster cell and gene therapies using Genexine’s know-how and Toolglen’s genetic scissors technology, it will maximize their corporate values.