Pharmabcine Inc. has received approval from the human research ethics committee (HREC) in Australia for a phase Ia/b trial of PMC-309, a monoclonal antibody against the human V-domain Ig suppressor of T-cell activation (VISTA) ligand.
Medigene AG has selected its lead candidate for MDG-2011, a T-cell receptor engineered T-cell (TCR-T) therapy targeting KRAS G12V with HLA-A*11 and being developed in combination with the company’s PD1-41BB costimulatory switch protein (CSP) technology.
Previous research has validated hematopoietic progenitor kinase 1 (HPK1) as a target in immune oncology, and pharmacological inhibition of HPK1 has been shown to enhance effector T-cell function and antitumor activity.
Lipids are “very diverse, but also vastly understudied,” Anne Brunet told the audience at the recent meeting on Aging Research and Drug Discovery. Advances in the ability to predict protein structures have fueled a much better understanding of the human proteome and its estimated 20,000 members. The lipidome is much larger, numbering maybe 100,000 total. And what those lipids do remains much more fuzzy. “Very little is known about their function, and especially their function during aging,” Brunet said. Slowly, however, technological advances are enabling researchers to understand the roles of lipids as well.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an exocrine pancreatic cancer with a poor prognosis and limited treatment options. There is a strong demand for new treatment strategies to overcome these challenges.
Osimertinib is a third-generation epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitor with documented efficacy in non-small-cell lung cancer. However, in most cases, patients develop resistance to this treatment by mechanisms that are not clear in half of the cases. Researchers from Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital presented data on BC-3448, a bispecific antibody targeting EGFR and CD3 aimed to recruit T cells to tumors with high EGFR expression leading to T cell-driven tumor cell killing. The compound presents a stronger binding affinity for EGFR than for CD3 to avoid the development of cytokine release syndrome, which is a safety issue common in CD3-based bispecific antibodies.
Noetik Inc. has closed an oversubscribed $14 million seed financing round. The company has built a multimodal tissue profiling platform that combines self-supervised learning with spatial biology to tackle problems in cancer immunology.
KRAS-mutated tumors were once untreatable. In fact, KRAS was something of a poster child for so-called undruggability. Several laboratories are investigating strategies to address other mutations and uses beyond non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and colorectal cancer. If you can't bind KRAS to block it, use a glue or combine multiple weapons. This is the idea behind two new approaches that target cancers caused by this proto-oncogene.
Hanchorbio Inc. and Shanghai Henlius Biotech Inc. have entered into a strategic framework agreement for collaboration to combine Hanchorbio’s protein engineering expertise and proprietary Fc-based designer biologics (FBDB) technology platform with Henlius’ integrated product development and commercialization capabilities.
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