J&J taps the bispecific experts at Xencor for prostate cancer discovery pact, kicking off with $50M upfront
On December 7, 2020, Endpoints News reported on Johnson & Johnson announcing that its Janssen subsidiary is teaming up with Xencor and looking to discover bispecific antibodies that grab CD28 on one end and an undisclosed prostate tumor target on the other. The upfront comes in at $50 million.
An immune costimulatory receptor on T cells, CD28 may be best known as a commonly used domain in CAR-T. But it’s also been studied on its own as a target, either with agonists that stimulate the immune cells’ ability to fight cancer, or with antagonists to suppress overactive immune responses.
In fact, J&J once worked on an autoimmune program with OSE Immunotherapeutics — one that it handed back after 5 years.
As a cancer therapy, systemic CD28 stimulation proved too much for even healthy people, sending six volunteers in a 2006 trial into cytokine storms. But more recently, scientists at Regeneron have shed light on the idea of using bispecifics to direct stir up CD28 in a more targeted manner, with mouse data to suggest that the approach be combined with either CD3 bispecifics or checkpoint inhibitors for enhanced effect.
Bassil Dahiyat, Xencor’s president and CEO, echoed those ideas while offering the collaboration as the latest example of what his company’s platform tech can do.
“These antibodies can co-stimulate T cells in a tumor-target dependent manner and can synergize with both checkpoint inhibitor therapies and other tumor-targeted agents, like CD3 bispecific antibodies, in order to enhance anti-tumor activity,” he said in a statement.
Xencor’s sole task will be creating and characterizing these antibody candidates. J&J is in charge of all development from preclinical onward.
In a somewhat unique arrangement, the deal also opens up the possibility for Xencor and J&J to pick out certain drugs from each others’ prostate cancer portfolios for combination studies. While they didn’t specify which ones are up for selection, both Zytiga and its successor Erleada have long been key drugs in J&J’s pipeline.
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