Agoura Hills-based biotech company A2 Biotherapeutics Inc. has begun clinical trials for the first drug derived from its cell therapy drug platform; the drug aims to treat patients with colorectal, pancreatic and non-small cell lung cancers.
The company announced on May 30 it had begun dosing its first patient in the initial clinical trial for the drug. This Phase 1 clinical trial will evaluate the drug’s safety and determine the optimal dose amount, setting the stage for more expansive clinical trials in the months and years ahead.
A2 Biotherapeutics launched as a cell-therapy company in January 2018, coming out of the gate with $57 million in series A financing. In 2020, A2 Biotherapeutics established a research collaboration with Darmstadt, Germany-based pharma giant Merck & Co. Inc., which represented the latter’s first foray into the field of allogeneic cell therapy, in which a single source of cells is used to treat many patients.
The company has since raised another $200 million-plus and has formed another partnership with Chicago-based genetic testing company Tempus. It opened its first cell-manufacturing plant near its Agoura Hills headquarters in August 2021, and last November signed a lease on a larger 76,000-square-foot facility nearby in the same city that will supplement the original plant. Eventually, A2 Biotherapeutics intends to move its headquarters to this new plant.
The as-yet unnamed drug now entering clinical trials is the first one to emerge from A2 Biotherapeutics’ “Tmod” platform, which has a dual-receptor design with an activator – the equivalent of an “on” switch – to target tumor cells and a blocker – or “off switch” – to protect normal cells. This novel design is aimed to tackle the fundamental challenge in solid-tumor cancer medicines – the ability to selectively kill tumor cells and protect normal cells. This limits the often more-widespread toxic side effects in the body posed by more traditional cancer drug therapies.
“We believe the selectivity of the Tmod platform forms the foundation for a new class of therapeutics for solid-tumor cancers, with the goal of killing tumors while avoiding the dose-limiting toxicities associated with well-known cancer targets,” Scott Foraker, the company’s chief executive, said in the announcement.
“This is the first medicine of an innovative pipeline that leverages the selectivity provided by the blocker to provide potentially safer and more efficacious therapeutics for cancer patients,” Foraker added.
Other biotech companies have approached this goal of treating cancer tumors while minimizing side effects by boosting the body’s immune cells to attack cancer cells in a very targeted fashion, leaving other cells alone. This is the tack taken by immunotherapy companies such as Culver City-based ImmunityBio Inc., Westwood-based Nammi Therapeutics Inc. and Pasadena-based Xencor Inc.
A2 Biotherapeutics, though, is convinced that developing further this finely tuned activator/blocker switch is the way to go. It has three other drugs in its pipeline, all utilizing its Tmod platform. One of those drugs, also as-yet unnamed, is nearing clinical trial phase; it aims to treat the same types of cancers as the first one, plus ovarian and mesothelioma cancers.