Imugene Ltd and Eureka Therapeutics, Inc have entered into a strategic collaboration to evaluate Imugene’s CD19 oncolytic virus onCARlytics technology in combination with Eureka’s anti-CD19 ARTEMIS® T-cell therapy for the treatment of solid tumours.
The collaboration has the potential to address the lack of tumour-specific targets in solid tumours for T-cell therapies by using oncolytic virus to force tumours to express CD19.
Oncolytic viruses in combination with T-cell therapies represent a novel and promising approach to treat solid tumours.
Preclinical studies
In preclinical studies conducted by the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, scientists combined CAR-T therapy with an oncolytic virus to eliminate solid tumours in mice.
The virus enters the tumour cells and forces them to express the CD19 protein on the cell surface, presenting a target for anti-CD19 T-cells to pursue and kill.
Imugene licensed the patents covering City of Hope’s oncolytic virus technology in May 2021.
Shift cellular medicine paradigm
Imugene managing director and CEO Leslie Chong said: “T-cell and CAR-T therapies have not achieved much success in solid tumours in part because of a lack of tumour-specific targets.
“By using our proprietary oncolytic technology to force the tumour to express the CD19 target, we now have the ability to address this shortcoming.
“We believe the synergy between our onCARlytics platform and Eureka’s anti-CD19 ARTEMIS® T-cells has the potential to shift the cellular medicine paradigm in treating solid tumours.”
Combination approach
Eureka Therapeutics president and CEO Dr Cheng Liu added: “We are delighted to be working with Imugene on tackling solid tumours using this innovative approach.
“We believe our ARTEMIS® T-cell platform to be the ideal one to evaluate this combination.
“In head-to-head pre-clinical studies against CAR-T cells, our ARTEMIS® T-cells demonstrated superior efficacy, enhanced tumour infiltration and less T-cell exhaustion.
“In the clinical context, our ARTEMIS® T-cells have demonstrated reduced cytokine release syndrome (CRS) and other cytokine-related toxicities compared to CAR-T cells, potentially improving the efficacy and safety of a combination approach.”
‘Mark and kill’ approach
Saul Priceman, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Hematology and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation at City of Hope and co-inventor of the platform said: “By combining oncolytic virus and CAR T-cell therapies, we have developed a ‘mark and kill’ approach to treating solid tumours with T-cell therapies.
“In our animal studies, we were able to express CD19 in triple-negative breast, pancreatic, prostate, ovarian and head and neck cancer, as well as brain tumours.”
Eureka Therapeutics
Eureka Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on developing novel cancer T-cell therapies to treat cancers.
The company is developing potentially safer and more effective T cell therapies for the treatment of solid tumours and hematologic malignancies using its ARTEMIS® cell receptor platform and E-ALPHA® antibody discovery platform.
ET140203 and ECT204, the company’s lead assets, are currently in Phase I/II US multi-center clinical trials in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common form of liver cancer.