Takeda's plot to catch up in IO

Takeda knows it was late to the immuno-oncology revolution. But when it came time to catch up, “we did not want to be the 16th, 17th, or 18th company with” an analog to Keytruda, said Phil Rowlands, the company’s head of cancer R&D. Instead, the roughly $55 billion Japanese drug maker decided to make the riskier choice, investing in early-stage ideas that could become the next generation of cancer care.

About three years into the process, those bets are beginning to take shape. The most recent is a spin on CAR-T that leans on the Nobel Prize-winning work of Shinya Yamanaka. The idea is to turn Yamanaka’s induced pluripotent stem cell cells — or iPSCs — into T cells and then do the familiar genetic engineering that transforms them into cancer killers. Takeda believes its so-called iCAR-Ts would be about 10,000-fold quicker to produce than first-generation therapies, which are drawn from patients, and more predictable than other off-the-shelf ideas, which rely on healthy donors whose T cells can vary in viability.

Takeda’s iCAR-Ts, still a year or so from human trials, are part of a multi-pronged effort to ensure that while the company missed the first wave of immuno-oncology, it’ll play a role in the next, Rowlands said.