Immatics NV’s IMA-203 “looks like a melanoma drug,” said Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Eric Schmidt after he took a peek at the latest data, prepared as part of an upcoming meeting with the U.S. FDA. The candidate emerged from Immatics’ Actengine platform, set up to formulate a personalized therapy in which a patient’s own T cells are collected, genetically modified and then reinfused. Immatics offered data with IMA-203 as a monotherapy that targets preferentially expressed antigen in melanoma from an ongoing phase I trial testing what’s been established as the recommended phase II dose of 1-10x109 TCR-T cells in 30 heavily pretreated metastatic melanoma patients who were evaluable for efficacy.
After several delays, the interleukin-15 superagonist Anktiva (nogapendekin alfa inbakicept) from Immunitybio Inc. has been approved by the U.S. FDA for treating bladder cancer, specifically Bacillus Calmette-Guérin-unresponsive non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer with carcinoma in situ, with or without papillary tumors.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. has tapped into Treefrog Therapeutics SA’s high-throughput stem cell manufacturing technology in a deal worth potentially up to $780 million to help it advance its type 1 diabetes programs, including phase I/II asset VX-880.