Alloy Therapeutics inked an antibody discovery deal with Normunity Thursday to advance the latter’s immune normalizers, antibody therapies that boost the body’s natural immune system to fight cancer.
Courtesy of Getty Images
Alloy Therapeutics inked an antibody discovery deal with Normunity Thursday to advance the latter’s immune normalizers, antibody therapies that boost the body’s natural immune system to fight cancer.
The Thursday morning announcement comes three weeks after Normunity launched with $65 million in Series A financing. Under the terms of the deal, Normunity will gain access to Daedamab, Alloy’s antibody discovery services team.
The team’s research is centered around ATX-Gx, Alloy’s proprietary platform that utilizes mice for human therapeutic antibody discovery. Alloy also utilizes “robust B cell isolation, next-generation sequencing, cloning-free expression and a high throughput screening process,” according to the press release.
All of this will be used to advance Normunity’s immune normalizers, a new class of drug agents based on research by immuno-oncology researcher Dr. Lieping Chen and his work at the Yale School of Medicine.
In a previous statement, Normunity CEO Rachel Humphrey, M.D. told BioSpace, “Immune normalizers target mechanisms that enable a normal, active immune system into ‘cold’ tumors that are not infiltrated with immune cells, and thus are not recognized by the immune system and resistant to present-day immunotherapies.”
According to Humphrey, what makes immune normalizers different from other cancer immunotherapies is that they do not rely on immune cells to be in the tumor environment. She said there is a “great unmet need because between 60-70% of solid tumors don’t have T cells,” making them unresponsive to currently available therapies.
Collaborations are nothing new for Alloy - since its inception, it has partnered with over “130 teams across academia, biotech and large biopharma organizations,” according to the announcement. In this deal, Alloy stated the pair would focus on “multiple precision immuno-oncology programs.”
Though the announcement did not contain specific details about the programs, Humphrey previously said Normunity has identified at least five potential targets and that the Series A financing would allow it to advance one to two candidates into the clinic.
