As T cell re­cep­tors emerged as a po­tent tool for the im­mune sys­tem to latch on­to tu­mor anti­gens, Stephen Elledge want­ed to screen anti­gen-TCR match­es in a faster, more sys­tem­at­ic way — one that would go be­yond cur­rent­ly known tar­gets but stop short of the new realms of neoanti­gens bioin­for­mat­ic pre­dic­tions.

Stephen Elledge

So the Har­vard pro­fes­sor spent the last 7 years con­sol­i­dat­ing new tech to come up with a plat­form that can run mul­ti­ple TCRs against anti­gen epi­topes and pin­point the ex­act pairs that ap­pear to in­ter­act. There’s al­so a built-in li­brary of the hu­man pep­tidome to flag any off-tar­get ef­fects and pre­vent safe­ty scares down the road.

What start­ed out on 96 plates in Elledge’s lab has now been scaled up and spun out to TScan Ther­a­peu­tics, which is now mak­ing its first pub­lic ap­pear­ance with $48 mil­lion in to­tal Se­ries A and B fund­ing.

The in­ter­est from No­var­tis In­sti­tutes for Bio­Med­ical Re­search was a key im­pe­tus for the round, CEO David South­well told me. The phar­ma gi­ant’s ven­ture arm al­so joined along­side Besse­mer, GV and Long­wood Fund.

“The whole goal is sort of to do it dif­fer­ent­ly than the way every­one else is do­ing it,” he said, which al­so ex­plained why he jumped on board last Oc­to­ber af­ter merg­ing In­otek with Rock­et.

One of Elledge’s big break­throughs here, South­well said, is de­vel­op­ing a unique flu­o­res­cent de­tec­tor sys­tem to find the prover­bial nee­dle in the haystack.

“It’s long been known as what hap­pens when a cy­to­tox­ic T cell meets an anti­gen is that it puts out com­pounds like per­forin, which put holes in the tu­mor cells, and granzyme B, which is a mes­sen­ger that is es­sen­tial­ly a cy­tokine which tells a cell to die. So that’s been known,” he said. “The ques­tion is how do you ac­tu­al­ly mea­sure the ac­tu­al killing ac­tiv­i­ty be­tween the cy­to­tox­ic T cell and a tar­get?”

The abil­i­ty to sort that all out on the fly means TScan can run a high-through­put, whole-genome search for nov­el anti­gens and the T cell re­cep­tors that may tar­get them.

There are many paths to go down with a plat­form as broad as this, and South­well read­i­ly ad­mits he’s yet to make up his mind as to whether TScan will opt for plat­form li­cens­ing or keep more of the de­vel­op­ment pro­grams to it­self. But the mon­ey they have is more than enough for a team of 20 sci­en­tists — many scooped from promi­nent biotechs like Ed­i­tas, CRISPR, KSQ and Juno — do­ing dis­cov­ery work.

The plat­form “is so broad that we could do a num­ber of phar­ma part­ner­ships that are dif­fer­ent in their scope, they don’t com­pete with each oth­er, and they leave us open to de­vel­op what we want, which is a repos­i­to­ry of TCR anti­gen pairs that work in both sol­id and liq­uid tu­mors,” he said.

Be­fore ar­riv­ing at that al­lo­gene­ic fu­ture, though, TScan has a tight time­line to ex­e­cute on au­tol­o­gous projects. The goal is to have two lead can­di­dates with­in 6 to 9 months and go in­to 2021 with a cou­ple of INDs.

Much of that will be con­duct­ed in a new site at Waltham, Mass­a­chu­setts, which will of­fer a key com­po­nent that their cur­rent digs at Har­vard Med­ical School lack: GMP man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties.

“One of the biggest mis­takes that cell ther­a­py com­pa­nies make is hav­ing a plat­form like this and then you find a lead, and you’re re­al­ly ex­cit­ed about your lead, and you haven’t fig­ured out how to man­u­fac­ture it,” he said.

He’s re­cruit­ed Ken LeClair out of Ed­i­tas to run that op­er­a­tion. Gavin MacBeath, a sci­en­tif­ic founder of Mer­ri­mack, is CSO; Am­gen vet Hen­ry Rath is han­dling all the phar­ma in­ter­est as CBO; and Robert Crane is CFO.

Celyad’s view on developing and delivering a CAR T-cell therapy with multi-tumor specificity combined with cell manufacturing success
Overview
Transitioning potential therapeutic assets from academia into the commercial environment is an exercise that is largely underappreciated by stakeholders, except for drug developers themselves. The promise of preclinical or early clinical results drives enthusiasm, but the pragmatic delivery of a therapy outside of small, local testing is most often a major challenge for drug developers especially, including among other things, the manufacturing challenges that surround the production of just-in-time and personalized autologous cell therapy products.

The ads piqued interest as soon as they started appearing in 2016: at Grand Central Station, on the Red Line in Cambridge, and on a billboard off the New Jersey Turnpike. All showed a young person, generally with his or her arms crossed, and the question, “what is Vivitrol?”

Vivitrol’s maker, Alkermes, was in the midst of a marketing and lobbying campaign to promote the anti-opioid addiction drug — a campaign that would face significant backlash for tarnishing competitors despite little evidence for Vivitrol’s superiority.

The FDA in-house review highlights a disagreement of investigators’ use of a key endpoint by Horizon Pharma in the late-stage trial for the top drug in its pipeline, but largely agreed that the antibody was effective.

Horizon submitted a BLA for thyroid eye disease (TED) drug teprotumumab in March, less than two years after they bought the drug (and the rest of a division) from Narrow River for $145 million upfront. With breakthrough status, priority review, orphan designation and in-house sales projections of up to $750 million, the one-time Roche reject became the marquee pipeline asset for a company that’s developed some of the world’s most expensive drugs.

Seattle Genetics $SGEN is showing off more positive data around tucatinib, its pivotal-stage drug for HER2 positive breast cancer.

A month after hearing about solidly upbeat hazard ratios, we learned today that the estimated progression-free survival rate at one year was 33% in the tucatinib arm compared to 12% for patients taking trastuzumab and capecitabine alone.

Median PFS was 7.8 months (95% CI: 7.5, 9.6) in the tucatinib arm, compared to 5.6 months (95% CI: 4.2, 7.1) in the control arm.

It’s a case of some bad timing for Intec.

Just when a key trial testing the company’s Accordion drug delivery tech imploded in Parkinson’s disease, they handed Novartis data from a successful PK study of a custom Accordion pill engineered to deliver a Novartis compound to entice the Swiss drugmaker into signing a licensing agreement.

Novartis said thanks, but no thanks.

For the cash-strapped Israeli drug developer, the failure to clinch the deal marks a big blow. As of the third quarter, the company has $15.7 million in cash and equivalents, which HC Wainwright analysts estimate will keep the lights on into mid-2020.