When Adri­an Raw­cliffe of­fi­cial­ly steps in­to the CEO role at Adap­ti­m­mune in a few days, he will have a new part­ner­ship to ex­e­cute in one of his first ef­forts to shore up some en­thu­si­asm for its T cell ther­a­py pro­grams.

Adri­an Raw­cliffe

In a $312 mil­lion pact, the US-UK hy­brid biotech has en­list­ed Noile-Im­mune for a next-gen­er­a­tion project that will boost Adap­ti­m­mune’s SPEAR T cells with the Japan­ese com­pa­ny’s PRIME plat­form. In ad­di­tion to the re­cep­tors en­gi­neered in­to the T cells, the re­sult­ing prod­uct would be armed with the cy­tokines IL-7 and CCL19.

Noile-Im­mune has been ap­ply­ing their tech­nol­o­gy — in­vent­ed by Ko­ji Tama­da of Ya­m­aguchi Uni­ver­si­ty — to CAR-T cells, pre­vi­ous­ly ink­ing a co-de­vel­op­ment deal with Take­da.

Not on­ly does PRIME make the en­gi­neered cells more po­tent, it may al­so en­hance the abil­i­ty of the pa­tient’s na­tive T cells to fight sol­id tu­mors, ac­cord­ing to Karen Miller, Adap­ti­m­mune’s SVP of pipeline re­search.

Karen Miller

“We re­cent­ly start­ed our Phase 2 tri­al in sar­co­ma called SPEAR­HEAD-1 as well as the SUR­PASS tri­al, our first next-gen­er­a­tion prod­uct clin­i­cal tri­al. We will con­tin­ue to de­vel­op en­hanced prod­ucts with the aim of in­creas­ing the ef­fi­ca­cy and dura­bil­i­ty of an­ti-tu­mor re­spons­es,” she added in a state­ment.

It’s crunch time for Adap­ti­m­mune. Once a dar­ling in the I/O crowd with a bud­ding TCR tech, its sup­port on Wall Street has been wan­ing since its $191 mil­lion pub­lic de­but in 2015, which in turn fol­lowed a high pro­file $350 mil­lion col­lab­o­ra­tion with Glax­o­SmithK­line. The stock opened at $1.47 to­day, a pre­cip­i­tous fall from last fall’s peak of $13.9. As founder James No­ble pass­es the reins to CFO Raw­cliffe — a GSK vet — the theme now is to make things hap­pen.

Adap­ti­m­mune will now work with Noile-Im­mune on pre­clin­i­cal work around a num­ber of tar­gets, with a goal to en­ter the clin­ic by 2021. That will all hap­pen un­der a new CMO and R&D pres­i­dent af­ter Rafael Ama­do hit the ex­it ear­li­er this month.

At last count the com­pa­ny had about $35 mil­lion in cash on hand and $133 mil­lion in liq­uid­i­ty, giv­ing it a run­way that ex­tends in­to the third quar­ter of next year.

So­cial im­age cred­it: Navy Yard

Six months after launching his first biotech SPAC, Foresite’s Jim Tananbaum has started a second. On Tuesday, the longtime life science investor filed to raise $100 million by selling 10 million shares of the blank check company FS development II.

It’s a quick return to Wall Street for Foresite, although other firms have moved quicker. Perceptive Advisors raised a $130 million SPAC in June and were back before the end of July to raise another $125 million. By that point, the firm was evidently nearing a deal for the June SPAC, which would announce a half-billion-dollar merger with Cerevel Therapeutics on July 30.

Hours before President Biden’s Covid-19 team gave their first virtual press conference, the famed AIDS researcher David Ho delivered concerning news in a new pre-print: SARS-CoV-2 B.1.351, the variant that emerged in South Africa, is “markedly more resistant” to antibodies from convalescent plasma and vaccinated individuals.

The news for several monoclonal antibodies, including Eli Lilly’s bamlanivimab, was even worse: Their ability to neutralize was “completely or markedly abolished,” Ho wrote. Lilly’s antibody cocktail, which was just shown to dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalizations or death, also became far less potent.