Bristol Myers Squibb Co. has completed a $20 million equity investment in Compugen Ltd., part of an ongoing expansion a collaboration between the companies to combine their medicines for the potential benefit of patients with solid tumors.
It’s been a decade since the first checkpoint inhibitors were approved, but the problem of low response rates remains in many forms of cancer. Highlight Therapeutics SL, of Valencia, Spain, hopes to change all that with an approach that primes the body to become more responsive to immunotherapies.
Bristol Myers Squibb Co.’s Opdivo (nivolumab) is now the first and only immunotherapy for the first-line treatment of advanced gastric cancer in China.
Akeso Inc. became the fifth company to score an approval for a homegrown PD-1 antibody in China, with penpulimab cleared for relapsed or refractory (r/r) classic Hodgkin’s lymphoma (cHL). The company is seeking more approvals for nasopharyngeal and lung cancers in both China and the U.S. to stand out in the increasingly competitive PD-1 space.
Wall Street must wait a while longer to find out if Gilead Sciences Inc. will exercise its $275 million option for Arcus Biosciences Inc.’s TIGIT binder, domvanalimab. Meanwhile, investors took heart from an optimistic – albeit vague – interim report on the phase II ARC-7 trial.
Researchers from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) said they have used two-dimensional nanosheets (FePSe3) to develop a biomimetic nanosheet that can monitor tumor development, treat tumors and monitor the treatment progress in real-time. With positive results from mice, the team hopes to further test it on larger animals, then move on to clinical studies.
Phase II data from Iovance Biotherapeutics Inc. in advanced melanoma at the recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology turned up an important relationship between previous anti-PD-1 therapy exposure and the durability of treatment response. Findings added weight to the idea that tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) should be deployed earlier in therapy.
DUBLIN – Numab Therapeutics AG has moved closer to the front rank of European antibody developers by raising CHF100 million (US$111 million) in a series C financing round to accelerate the development of NM21-1480, a trispecific antibody that acts both as a PD-L1 inhibitor and 4-1BB (CD137) agonist. It also contains a human serum albumin recognition group, to extend its circulatory half-life.
Dublin – IO Biotech ApS raised €127 million (US$154.7 million) in a series B round to fund a potentially pivotal trial of its combination of cancer vaccines in first-line metastatic melanoma. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company is one of a number of firms fueling a mini-resurgence in immuno-oncology in the early weeks of the new year, as new data and new insights are prompting additional investments in an area that some had thought was already oversubscribed.
