UNITED STATES
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
Washington, D.C. 20549
FORM
CURRENT REPORT
PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d)
OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934
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| Item 1.01 | Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement. |
On September 28, 2020, Ziopharm Oncology, Inc., or the Company, entered into an amendment to the patent license agreement, or the Amendment, with the National Cancer Institute, or the NCI. The Amendment amended the patent license agreement, or the License, between the Company and the NCI, dated May 28, 2019 and amended on January 8, 2020, pursuant to which the Company holds an exclusive, worldwide license to certain intellectual property to develop and commercialize patient-derived (autologous), peripheral blood T-cell therapy products engineered by transposon-mediated gene transfer to express T-cell receptors, or TCRs, reactive to mutated KRAS, TP53 and EGFR.
Pursuant to the Amendment, the Company expanded the TCR library licensed from the NCI to include additional TCRs reactive to mutated KRAS. The Company’s license to develop and commercialize products based on the additional TCRs are subject to the same limitations and obligations set out in the original License. The Company is required to pay the NCI a cash payment of $411,000 within sixty days of the execution date of the Amendment and is required to make the performance-based payments and benchmark payments in the License for products that include the additional TCRs.
The foregoing description of the material terms of the Amendment does not purport to be complete and is subject to, and is qualified in its entirety by, reference to the Amendment, which will be filed as an exhibit to the Company’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ending September 30, 2020 and is incorporated by reference herein. Portions of the Amendment may be subject to a confidential treatment request to the Securities and Exchange Commission pursuant to Rule 24b-2 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.
SIGNATURES
Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned hereunto duly authorized.
| ZIOPHARM ONCOLOGY, INC. | ||||
| By: | /s/ Robert Hadfield | |||
| Date: October 1, 2020 | Name: | Robert Hadfield | ||
| Title: | General Counsel and Secretary | |||