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news.Adaptimmune has received £2.1m grant from the Biomedical Catalyst Fund to advance the development of company’s second engineered T cell therapy program into the clinic in triple negative breast cancer.
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The company will use the funding to advance its second clinical program with a new TCR to enter the clinic in the UK.
Biomedical Catalyst Fund’s £2.1m grant will support preclinical testing and regulatory approval for an initial pilot trial, which is set to begin in 2015, with a new TCR targeting an undisclosed protein found to be highly expressed in some forms of breast cancer and other cancer types.
In the second engineered T cell therapy program, T lymphocytes of patients will be engineered by Adaptimmune to target and kill cancer cells when re-infused into the body.
Adaptimmune’s approach is focused on engineering increased affinity T cell receptors, the molecules on the surface of cytotoxic T lymphocytes that are naturally designed to recognize cancer cells.
The company’s unique approach relies on the ability to fine-tune the affinity of the T cells to recognize the small protein fragments from intracellular cancer-specific proteins presented on the cell surface.
The novel class of cancer targets cannot be bound by antibodies or chimeric antigen receptor T cells and natural affinity T cell receptors fail to bind effectively to cause a killing response.
Adaptimmune has a pipeline of T cell receptors recognizing such targets and the funding award comes at a time when the company is significantly increasing its activities in the UK as well as the USA.
Adaptimmune CEO James Noble noted the company is delighted to be announcing the Biomedical Catalyst Fund support for its next pipeline TCR and its path towards the clinic in 2015.
"We have a wide portfolio of cancer targets to be exploited in this way and our objective is to develop this pipeline of TCRs as rapidly as possible for the benefit of patients," Noble added.
Adaptimmune already has one T cell receptor program in multiple cancer trials in the US, with promising initial results.
The existing clinical program targets a peptide from two cancer testis antigens (CT antigens) called NY-ESO-1 and LAGE-1.
Currently, the company is performing studies in the US in multiple myeloma, melanoma, synovial sarcoma and ovarian cancer. Recently, the company reported results for multiple myeloma at the annual conference of the American Society of Hematology in December 2013.