Dr. Ivan Horak, Founder and CEO of Tikva Allocell, is focused on next-generation allogeneic cell therapies using modified T-cells from healthy donors to make these therapies more scalable, accessible, and affordable. Using virus-specific T-cells, this approach is showing effectiveness against solid tumors, which are difficult for traditional CAR-T therapies to treat. The primary target is an antigen found particularly in Epstein-Barr virus-associated malignancies and is showing potential for treating autoimmune diseases as well as cancer.

Ivan explains, "Cell therapy has a long history. We started with many scientists, but probably the godfather of the technology, Zelig Eshhar, who's not with us anymore. He passed away last year. The idea behind that was to use patient cells and modify them and use them as a fighter against the cancer. But over time, we realized over the last two decades that it's very useful, very successful in the treatment of hematologic malignancies, but it's very expensive and labor-intensive. The question was how to enhance this technology and bring it to more patients in a friendly and affordable way."

"The second generation are therapies where we are using healthy people's cells, primarily T-cells, but can be NK cells, can be gamma-delta T-cells. And these cells are being modified, and they are infused into a patient. The advantage of this technology is that patients are identified, and the provider can request the cell from different biotechnology companies, which can be available within the next few days, because from one healthy donor, you can make multiple doses for patients."

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Developing Accessible Virus-Specific T-Cell Therapies to Treat Solid Tumors with Dr. Ivan Horak Tikva Allocell TRANSCRIPT