Ziopharm Oncology Inc., of Boston, said the first patient has been enrolled in a phase I study of its second generation non-viral CD19-specific chimeric antigen receptor modified T-cell therapy in patients with advance lymphoid malignancies. The CD19-specific T cells were modified using the Sleeping Beauty system to stably express the CAR in T cells. Ziopharm described the Sleeping Beauty transposon-transposase as a unique non-viral system for introducing genes encoding CARs and T-cell receptors into lymphocytes and is exclusively licensed by Intrexon Corp., of Germantown, Md., through the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and accessed as part of Ziopharm's collaboration. (See BioWorld Today, Jan. 15, 2015.)