Date: 2014-01-13
Type of information: Licensing agreement
Compound: personalized dendritic cell vaccines and adoptive T-cell therapies
Company: Trianta Immunotherapies (Germany) Ascenion (Germany)
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology
Type agreement: licensing
Action mechanism: immunotherapy
Disease:
Details: * On January 13, 2014, Trianta Immunotherapies, a recently founded spin-off from the Helmholtz Zentrum München, has closed a license agreement with the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine Berlin-Buch (MDC) granting Trianta worldwide, exclusive rights to IP and know-how relating to technologies for the development of personalized dendritic cell vaccines and adoptive T-cell therapies. Both platforms are based on many years’ intense research and development work by Prof. Dolores Schendel and her team at the Helmholtz Zentrum München, in collaboration with Prof. Thomas Blankenstein at the MDC. Ascenion, the institutes’ technology transfer partner, has been working with the teams for years, helping to secure comprehensive patent protection and finally mediating the license contract. In the context of the deal, Ascenion has acquired an equity stake in the company.
Trianta pursues different immunotherapeutic strategies to target various tumour types and stages. Each one is focused on T cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a pivotal role in immunity. Trianta’s most advanced platform enables the design of personalized, third generation dendritic cell vaccines with unique capability to induce the maturation of tumour-specific T cells in a patient’s body and to trigger both T cells and natural killer cells to attack cancer cells. This approach is ideally suited to the treatment of minimal residual disease. First-in-man experience from compassionate-use settings suggest that these vaccines are safe and highly effective in eliciting immune responses. An academic Phase I trial in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is currently ongoing at the Ludwig Maximilian University Hospital, Munich, and an academic Phase II trial in prostate cancer is expected to start in 2014 at the Oslo University Hospital.
A second platform allows the development of adoptive T-cell therapies for the treatment of advanced tumour stages. Patient-derived T cells are armed ex vivo with new T-cell receptors that enable them to detect and kill cancer cells effectively. In this way, a large army of specific T cells is made available to patients within just 10 days, ready to combat the tumour, regardless of the generalized immune suppression caused by large tumour burdens in vivo. Trianta is currently establishing a comprehensive library of recombinant T-cell receptors and a GMP-compliant process for their combination with patient-derived T cells.
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