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Cue Biopharma and Merck to Evaluate CUE-101 + KEYTRUDA® (pembrolizumab) in 1L HPV+ Recurrent/Metastatic Head and Neck Cancer
“We are very pleased to collaborate in this important study with Merck, an established leader in cancer immunotherapy, with our first clinical asset, CUE-101, which represents our IL-2 variant CUE-100 Series,” said Daniel Passeri, chief executive officer of Cue Biopharma. “Through the monotherapy and combination studies, we believe we will be able to demonstrate the mechanistic advantages of our approach and platform for modulating disease-relevant T cells directly in the patient’s body to safely enhance efficacy over current standards of care.”
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Gilead, Kite and oNKo-innate Announce Research Collaboration to Discover Cancer Immunotherapies Focused on Natural Killer (NK) Cells
“Gilead is pleased to partner with oNKo-innate as a leader in this new and highly promising area of cancer immunotherapy,” said William A. Lee, PhD, Executive Vice President, Research, Gilead Sciences. “We have a strategic focus of growing both our expertise and pipeline in immuno-oncology and we believe this exciting collaboration will support each of these objectives as we work to discover and develop novel cancer therapies for patients.”
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TRACON Pharmaceuticals Retains Global Rights to TRC253 Following Completion of Ph 1/2 Trial
“While TRC253 is as active as Xtandi in prostate cancer cell lines and in patient-derived xenograft models, we determined during clinical development that the F877L androgen receptor mutation TRC253 was designed to treat was far less common than predicted, and the product candidate was not highly active in prostate cancer patients with acquired resistance to Xtandi or Erleada. Given the preclinical data that suggest TRC253 may be as active as Xtandi in an earlier line setting, we believe TRC253 can be developed and commercialized successfully in China where many prostate cancer patients do not have widely available access to Xtandi or Erleada,” said Charles Theuer, M.D., Ph.D., President and CEO of TRACON. “As we have established three corporate partnerships in China over the past three years, we have developed significant relationships with Chinese pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that we intend to leverage to identify a potential partner for TRC253 in this large oncology indication.”
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Moderna bags BARDA funding of $483 million for advancing its COVID-19 mRNA vaccine
Moderna Inc. (Moderna, Cambridge, MA) has secured a commitment from Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) of $483 million in accelerating the clinical trials of its mRNA vaccine, mRNA-1273, against SARS-CoV-2. The announcement was made on 16th April 2020.
Moderna has demonstrated its expertise with mRNA vaccines in diverse set of disease fields which include infectious diseases (CMV, EBV and Zika), respiratory infections (RSV, H7N9) and cancers (solid tumors and melanoma), many of which are in clinical trials.
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Astellas acquires Nanna Therapeutics for $15 million, adding mitochondria-focussed drug discovery platform to its expanding portfolio
On 21st April 2020, Nana Therapeutics Limited (Nanna, Cambridge, MA) announced its acquisition by Astellas Pharma Inc. (Astellas, HQ: Japan) in a deal involving a little under $15 million for buying issued share capital of Nanna. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Astella, with the eligibility to receive future potential milestone payments of up to $71 million.
Nanna has been developing advanced and more diverse DNA encoded chemical libraries (DELs), which are compatible with phenotype-based screening and cell-based assays using patient derived cells, not possible on conventional DEL platforms.
In comparison with high throughput plate-based assays, Nanna’s CEO David Williams told endpoint news- “All of those technologies use a very miniaturized approach..So we use a microfluidic platform base where we can do essentially a lot of experiments in a very very small area — volume, and what that allows us the potential to do is to access diseased tissue or patient cells or very rare, difficult-to-obtain proteins to be able to do more functional assays on them.”
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FoRx Therapeutics bags $11 million seed funding from big pharma VCs for damaging DNA across cancers
Forx Therapeutics (Basel, Switzerland) is a biotechnology company that develops cancer drugs intervening in DNA replication stress pathways. The company’s founder Thanos Halazonetis, has pioneered research in the field of break-induced replication (BIR), a mechanism found across cancers.
While the drug targets and lead molecules are as yet undisclosed, Novartis Venture Funds, Pfizer Ventures, Merck’s M Ventures and Omega Funds have entrusted Forx Therapeutics with $11 million funding in the seed round for its technology that is a potential treatment panning cancers. The announcement was made on 22nd April 2020. The BIR targets have shown potential in therapy and maintenance treatment in pre-clinical studies and present low risk of treatment resistance that is the eventually outcome of most treatment modalities. The company is hopeful of starting clinical trials in 3 years, targeting hard to treat cancers like colon cancer, first.
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