5 August 2020 - - US-based immuno-oncology company T-Cure Bioscience, Inc has extended its ongoing research collaboration with the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), through a formal Collaborative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to advance the company's HERV-E targeting TCR therapy for renal cell cancer, the company said.

Additionally, T-Cure has amended an existing license to expand to worldwide rights for the intellectual property it licensed from NHBI related to the anti-HERV-E TCR product.

This TCR therapy is currently in a Phase 1 trial at NHLBI for the treatment of metastatic clear cell Renal Cell Carcinoma (ccRCC) that failed an angiogenic inhibitor and a checkpoint inhibitor.

T-Cure has been actively collaborating for the past 18 months with NHLBI on the research and development of the HERV-E-specific TCR.

Under the CRADA, T-Cure and NHLBI will collaborate to develop a companion test to identify HERV-E transcripts in patients' tumors as well as to identify additional therapy candidates targeting HERV-E using the company's proprietary TCR discovery platform, iSORT.

Additionally, NHLBI and T-Cure plan to conduct preclinical experiments characterizing novel TCR and will evaluate various drug and TCR combination anti-tumor therapeutic strategies.

The HERV-E target is one of the quiescent Human Endogenous Retrovirus sequences that are activated during tumor development.

A growing number of HERV genes and proteins are expressed in different cancers raising the possibility that HERV derived antigens might represent excellent targets for tumor immunotherapy. Its expression in renal cell carcinoma is highly selective, with no transcripts detected in any normal tissues.

In contrast to well-studied antigens such as NY-ESO-1 and MAGE, HERV-E represents a new frontier of TCR targets with significant clinical potential for immunotherapy.

T-Cure Bioscience, Inc. is an innovative immuno-oncology company committed to delivering effective and durable cell therapies for the treatment of cancer.

The company focuses on isolating high avidity TCR that can be used to engineer a patient's T cells to effectively target and destroy solid tumors.

The company maintains a pipeline of TCR under clinical and pre-clinical development targeting HERV-E, KK-LC-1, NY-ESO-1 and other antigens associated with solid tumors of significant unmet medical needs, including kidney cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, gastric cancer, ovarian cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, sarcoma, and glioblastoma.