Preclinical toxicology and pharmacology evaluation of a newTNFR2 antagonistic monoclonal antibody for CTCL therapy

PROJECT SUMMARY Cancer has killed over 600,000 people in US in 2020. The cost for healthcare and society is unbearable: because of cancer, $180B healthcare expenditure and $134B lost productivity are recorded every year. This is happening despite recent advancements in therapy and the emergence of an ever expanding array of new therapeutics for the over 1.8M new cancer patients every year. Indeed, because of the multitude and redundancy of mechanisms contributing to cancer growth, therapies are often ineffective. Several components should be targeted at the same time in order to maximize therapy outcome. However, this is particular hard to attain because of 1) the striking variability among cancers and the limited number of cancer specific targets 2) the ability of cancer cells to orchestrate a microenvironment of healthy tissue and cells around them, that promote cancer growth and therapy resistance. Boston Immune Technologies and Therapeutics (BITT) is developing BITT-1492, able to target both cancer cells and their microenvironment. BITT-1492 is an antagonist antibody against TNFR2 – a receptor highly expressed in cancer tissue and immune suppressive cells in the microenvironment, where it mediates pro-survival signaling. Thanks to BITT’s proprietary antibody design platform, BITT-1492 is the first and only antibody able to dominantly shut down TNFR2 signaling. Due to selective expression and key role of TNFR2 for a variety of cancers and tumor microenvironment cells, BITT-1492 will find application in the therapy of several cancers, starting with Cutaneous T cell Lymphoma (CTCL), where TNFR2 is known to act as an extremely potent oncogene. BITT has already completed extensive pre-clinical validation for BITT-1492, demonstrating potent activity in CTCL, colon and ovarian cancers. In the proposed Fast-Track project, BITT will complete a pre-clinical toxicology and pharmacology assessment of BITT-1492 to obtain relevant data for an Investigational New Drug (IND) application. This will be accomplished by performing, in line with ICH guidelines, an exploratory small-scale toxicology study to be carried out in Phase I, that will demonstrate the safety of use of BITT-1492 for a wider IND-enabling toxicology and pharmacokinetic studies in Phase II. As part of the PhaseII BITT will also test the suitability of BITT-1492 production process for cGMP standard compliance. At the end of the SBIR project, BITT will be ready to advance BITT-1492 to clinical testing for which a combination of Venture Capital seed funds and SBIR PhaseIIb are expected to be leveraged. The successful completion of this project and initial clinical testing evidence will help to secure the already expressed interest of pharmaceutical companies with whom BITT will engage to complete late-stage clinical testing and launch BITT-1492 into international markets.PROJECT NARRATIVE TNFR2 is an extremely promising target for cancer therapy, especially in CTCL, where it reportedly act as an oncogenic driver. However, strategies aimed at TNFR2 targeting fail to shut down its pro-survival signaling. BITT is developing the first-in-class dominant antagonist to TNFR2 with potent anti-tumor effect in CTCL, and whose use can easily be expanded for the treatment of several cancers.