Alaunos Therapeutics, Inc. announced that the Company has extended its Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), using the Alaunos Sleeping Beauty technology through January 2025. Under the terms of the CRADA, the NCI will work to generate proof of concept utilizing the Company's proprietary non-viral Sleeping Beauty technology for personalized TCR-T cell therapy. In this setting, T-cell receptors (TCRs) that react to the patient's tumor will be identified from the patient and used to generate a TCR-T cell therapy.

This approach could potentially apply to a wide range of solid tumor cancer patients. Alaunos believes that the non-viral Sleeping Beauty technology could rapidly and cost effectively produce safe and potent TCR-T cell therapies without the complexity of gene editing or viral approaches. Research conducted under the CRADA will be led by Steven A. Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D., Chief of the Surgery Branch at the NCI's Center for Cancer Research.