Cartography is an early stage, platform-based cell therapy company using single cell analysis to identify novel CAR-T targets.
While CAR-T cells have met with initial success in B-cell malignancies, current targets being pursued in T cell malignancies and solid tumors only address a small fraction of cancer patients. This is largely due to the present lack of targets with minimal off-tumor toxicity, highlighting a need to discover additional targets that are broadly and specifically expressed across cancer cells to account for tumor heterogeneity. Cartography is addressing this bottleneck using their novel single-cell, genomic platform to identify targets in a genomic-wide, cell-type-wide manner, compressing the timeline of CAR development from 1 year to a few weeks. Importantly, the novel targets identified can be used for development of different therapeutic modalities including cellular therapies and antibody-based therapies, highlighting the widespread applicability of their approach and strong partnership potential.