Cstone Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. presented preclinical data of CS-2009, a trispecific antibody targeting PD-1, CTLA-4 and VEGF-A, for cancer immunotherapy.

University of Auckland senior research fellow Jeff Smaill first visited China in 2012 as part of a team of 15 scientists from the Maurice Wilkins Center, one of New Zealand’s centers of excellence, to meet with scientists at the Guangzhou Institute of Medicine and Health to find partners to collaborate on drug development projects. The scientists started collaborating that year, and the first project is already in phase I trials in China. It was a joint discovery and development partnership from the beginning, he said.

University of Auckland senior research fellow Jeff Smaill first visited China in 2012 as part of a team of 15 scientists from the Maurice Wilkins Center, one of New Zealand’s centers of excellence, to meet with scientists at the Guangzhou Institute of Medicine and Health to find partners to collaborate on drug development projects. The scientists started collaborating that year, and the first project is already in phase I trials in China. It was a joint discovery and development partnership from the beginning, he said.

Genome & Co. Ltd. has reported preclinical findings of its anti-CNTN4 antibody, GENA-104A16, and anti-APP antibody, 5A7 — stressing the contactin-4 (CNTN4) and amyloid precursor protein (APP) axis as a potential target for immuno-oncology. In the latest murine experiments, investigators led by Genome executives and researchers of Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) found that blocking the interaction between CNTN4 and APP promoted cancer-destroying responses in mice, suggesting the pathway as a target for immunotherapy.

Oblique Therapeutics AB has achieved a milestone within its research project on the Nav1.8 ion channel with the goal of developing innovative therapeutics for patients with chronic pain.

The anti-HER2 biparatopic antibody (bpAb) KJ-015 was rationally designed at Shanghai Bao Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. by leveraging published antibody-antigen structures to share common light chain with two Fab arms, resulting in functionally balanced high affinity for two HER2 nonoverlapping epitopes.

Claudin-6 (CLDN6) is a tight junction protein that has been found to be up-regulated in around 20 different types of cancer, among them ovarian, endometrial and germ cell tumors. Conventional T-cell engagers (TCEs), although effective, may be improved with costimulation to overcome T-cell exhaustion due to CDE3 stimulation alone.