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Vcreate, Inc.

Address

1546 San Antonio Ave
Menlo Park, CA, 94025-3129
USA

UEI: TDGANH2K4J93

Number of Employees: 4

HUBZone Owned: No

Woman Owned: No

Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No

SBIR/STTR Involvement

Year of first award: 2022

Phase I Awards

Phase II Awards

33.33%

Conversion Rate

$867,581

Phase I Dollars

$1,000,000

Phase II Dollars

$1,867,581

Total Awarded

Awards

Up to 10 of the most recent awards are being displayed. To view all of this company's awards, visit the Award Data search page.

CONCEPT SBIR - T-CELL RECEPTORS FOR TREATING PEDIATRIC ACUTE MYELOID LEUKEMIA

Amount: $355,000 Topic: NCICA24

More than 30% of children diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) relapse after initial treatment, creating an urgent need for new treatment options. T-cell receptor (TCR) based therapies are a promising way to combat these cases due to their ability to target intracellular antigens that other therapies can’t reach. This proposal describes an approach to discover a set of known and novel AML-specific targets and new TCR drug candidates. A novel library-vs-library screening method will be used to screen repertoires of donor T-cells against 30 AML targets simultaneously for functional activation, with resolution of TCR-target interaction at the single-cell level. Beyond previously validated targets, novel AML targets will be selected across common MHC alleles for expression and presentation. Potential relationships between TCRs and AML targets can be identified through the analysis of single-cell sequencing data, and the most promising TCR candidates from the screen can be validated using gold-standard T cell assays. If successful, the TCRs identified by this proposal can be further developed into therapies for AML. Given the flexibility of TCRs, the method described in this proposal can also be applied to other cancers that lack treatment options for patients who fail frontline therapies.

SBIR

Phase I

2024

HHS

NIH

SBIR Phase II: High throughput and antigen specific T-cell receptor discovery for solid tumor treatments

Amount: $1,000,000 Topic: BT

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation (SBIR) Phase II project is to enable discovery of needed T-cell receptor (TCR) based therapeutics for late-stage cancer patients who have limited treatment options. These immunotherapies work by leveraging T-cells engineered with TCRs that will identify and destroy cancer cells that naturally present a target (antigen) specific to the cancer on their surface (e.g., cancer mutations). This project will apply a novel high-throughput platform developed in Phase I to screen millions of TCRs against a large set of cancer-related antigens to identify clinically relevant TCRs and validate the most promising TCRs for cancer-specific in-vitro and in-vivo killing. This project could impact society’s health by discovering TCRs that will serve as the basis for treatments against currently incurable cancers (e.g. breast cancer). The commercial impacts are potentially large. The total market size of T-cell therapeutics was $2.4 billion in 2018 and is estimated to reach $8.5 billion by 2027. The platform described by this proposal has the potential to discover many TCR based therapeutics, creating value for patients and society at large. The proposed project is to identify clinically valuable TCRs by applying a high-throughput TCR screening platform developed in Phase I. Data generated by this project could be critical for developing new immunotherapies against solid tumors and for understanding the biology that underlies TCR-antigen interaction. Screening millions of TCRs for functional activation against a large set of clinically relevant cancer antigens is challenging, as conventional screening technologies are largely limited to screening one antigen at a time. In contrast, the high-throughput screening assay developed in Phase I is capable of tracking interactions between hundreds of thousands of unique cells, where evidence linking TCR interaction with specific antigens that is captured and read out via single-cell sequencing. This project will generate data directly linking TCRs with 62 clinically important antigen targets. The most promising TCRs discovered will then be validated for specific and potent interaction against a target with in-vivo and in-vitro experiments. The objective of this project is to discover and validate a number of anti-cancer TCRs and generate pre-clinical data packages that illustrate their value as potential therapeutic drugs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

SBIR

Phase II

2024

NSF

Computational algorithm to predict interacting MHC alleles from TCR sequences

Amount: $256,581 Topic: 400

Abstract Major histocompatibility complexes (MHC) guide immune response by presenting antigen fragments on a cell’s surface and interacting with T-cell receptors (TCRs). In recent years, many T-cell therapies have successfully engineered T-cells to target MHC-antigen complexes associated with cancers and other diseases. However, most T-cell therapies require identifying a TCR that interacts with an MHC-antigen complex of interest, a slow and expensive search process. Our proposal aims to speed up this search process through a computational algorithm that will predict whether a TCR will interact with an MHC allele of interest. Current screening assays for low frequency TCRs have high false positive rates. Researchers can use our tool to computationally filter TCR candidates for interaction with a specific MHC allele before running expensive validation experiments. In this proposal, we will first validate our approach through a prototype algorithm that we will train on public TCR-MHC interaction data. We will then conduct new tetramer staining experiments that address two major challenges for developing an algorithm across multiple MHC alleles: the lack of interaction data for alleles other than A*02, and the limited antigen diversity in existing public data. These experiments will provide TCR-MHC data across 800 antigens for four common MHC alleles: A*01:01, A*02:01, A*11:01, and B*07:02. Finally, we will construct and validate computational algorithms for each MHC allele and evaluate the importance of various TCR components (e.g., alpha or beta chan, CDR3) in predicting TCR-MHC interaction. Our work will result in the first computational tool to help T-cell therapy developers filter TCR candidates based on MHC specificity. Beyond cell therapies, this tool will also help researchers track T-cells in diseases where MHC alleles play a major role.

SBIR

Phase I

2022

HHS

NIH

SBIR Phase I:High throughput and antigen specific T-cell receptor discovery through engineered macrophages

Amount: $256,000 Topic: BT

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable discovery of needed T-cell receptor (TCR) based therapeutics for late-stage cancer patients who have limited treatment options. These immunotherapies work by leveraging T-cells engineered with TCRs that will identify and destroy cancer cells that naturally present a marker (antigen) specific to the cancer on their surface (e.g., cancer mutations). This project will develop a high-throughput platform capable of screening many thousands of TCRs against many thousands of antigens to identify clinically relevant TCRs. This project could impact society’s health by discovering TCRs that will serve as the basis for treatments against currently incurable cancers. The commercial impacts are potentially large. The total market size of T-cell therapeutics was $2.4 billion in 2018 and is estimated to reach $8.5 billion by 2027. The platform described by this proposal has the potential to discover many TCR based therapeutics, creating value for patient and society at large.The proposed project is to develop a platform for identifying clinically valuable TCRs. This platform could be critical for developing new immunotherapies against solid tumors and for understanding the biology that underlies TCR-antigen interaction. Screening thousands of TCRs for functional activation against thousands of antigens is challenging due to the difficulty of tracking interactions between hundreds of thousands of unique cells. The proposed platform and method links T-cell activation with phagocytosis using engineered T-macrophage and antigen presenting cell (APC) lines. T-macrophages engulf APCs as directed by TCR activation, capturing evidence of an interaction within the T-macrophage. The resulting interactions can be read from the T-macrophages via single-cell sequencing. The objective of this project is to produce large cell-based libraries for TCR and antigens and to identify interacting TCR-antigen pairs. The antigen library will include hundreds of clinically relevant cancer targets, such as KRAS and TP53. These results will demonstrate the feasibility of our platform.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

SBIR

Phase I

2022

NSF