Business & Finance
BioInvent and Transgene announce collaboration to treat solid tumours
7 December 2017 -

BioInvent International AB (STO: BINV), a business focused on the discovery and development of novel and first-in-class immuno-regulatory antibodies to treat cancer, and Transgene (Paris: TNG), a company that designs and develops viral-based immunotherapies, announced on Wednesday the entering into a collaboration to treat solid tumours.

This collaboration will co-develop next generation oncolytic virus (OV) candidates encoding an anti-CTLA-4 antibody sequence, potentially with additional transgenes, capable of treating multiple solid tumours.

In addition, this union's research and development costs, as well as the revenues and royalties from candidates generated by the collaboration, will be shared 50:50.

Under the terms of the agreement Transgene will contribute both its OV design and engineering expertise, as well as its proprietary engineered Vaccinia virus, derived from its Invir.IO platform.

Reportedly, these oncolytic viruses are designed to directly and selectively destroy cancer cells by the intracellular replication of the virus in the cancer cell (oncolysis), which importantly induces an immune response against tumours (immunogenic lysis).

BioInvent will provide its cancer biology and antibody expertise to the collaboration, as well as anti-CTLA-4 monoclonal antibody coding sequences, generated through its proprietary n-CoDeR/FIRST platforms, which will be encoded from in Transgene's Invir.IO viral vectors.

This local expression of such therapeutic payloads in the cancer cell is expected to augment the anti-cancer effects of viral oncolysis, by efficiently modulating the tumour micro-environment and increasing the immunogenicity of the tumour.

Login
Username:

Password: