Lukas Bio’s CIK cell therapy cuts residual disease in high-risk lymphoma

The clinical outcomes for Lukas Bio, a Korean memory T-cell platform company, have been published in international academic journals.

Lukas Bio announced on Wednesday that the results of a mid-risk clinical study on cytokine-induced Killer (CIK) cells for high-risk lymphoma patients were approved for publication in Transplantation and Cellular Therapy, the official journal of the American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy.

Lukas Bio researchers present findings from clinical studies on memory T-cell-based therapies, which have been published in leading international medical journals. (Website of Lucas Bio)

According to the clinical results, the CIK cell therapy cultured using the proprietary LB-CIK platform effectively reduced minimal residual disease and significantly lowered the risk of recurrence by eliminating remaining cancer cells after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

The study also confirmed that administering CIK cells during the immune-vulnerable period following autologous transplantation promoted immune reconstruction and reduced the risk of opportunistic infections.

Compared to the historical three-year progression-free survival rate of 68.8 percent and overall survival rate of 78 percent for autologous stem cell transplant patients, the group of 20 patients who received CIK cells showed an improvement of more than 10 percentage points and 15 percentage points, respectively.

While autologous stem cell transplantation is a standard strategy for maintaining remission in high-risk lymphoma patients, there is currently no established maintenance or preventive treatment to stop recurrence after the transplant. Consequently, there has been a continuous clinical demand for new strategies to suppress recurrence effectively.

Lukas Bio has also completed clinical research on a T-cell therapy specific to Covid-19 antigens for patients with long-term infections and has submitted a treatment plan for review. The research, based on the LB-DTK platform, was published in June last year in Clinical Infectious Diseases. Both studies mark the first instances in Korea where mid-risk advanced regenerative medicine research was completed and subsequently published in international journals.