Adaptimmune wins fund payout
pharmafile | March 26, 2014 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | Adaptimmune, Cancer, T cell, biomedical, noble, sme
Biotech firm Adaptimmune has been awarded £2.1 million from the UK government’s Biomedical Catalyst Fund, which was set up to push forward translational research.
The £180 million fund, managed by the Technology Strategy Board and the Medical Research Council, was launched two years ago to help innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and academics develop solutions to healthcare challenges.
Adaptimmune specialises in finding ways of getting T cells to treat cancer, and will use the money to develop its second engineered T cell therapy programme in triple negative breast cancer, which is expected to progress to trial stage next year.
The company’s scientists engineer increased affinity T cell receptors (TCRs) – molecules found on the surface of cytotoxic T lymphocytes, which recognise cancer cells.
Chief scientific officer Bent Jakobsen explains: “The ability of T cells to track down and kill cancer cells is one of the most powerful weapons we can bring to bear on the disease.”
Its latest research is with a new TCR targeting an undisclosed protein which is highly expressed in some forms of breast cancer and in other cancers – Adaptimmune already has one T cell receptor programme in multiple myeloma, melanoma, synovial sarcoma and ovarian cancer in the US.
This targets a peptide from two cancer testis antigens, NY-ESO-1 and LAGE-1, both of which are expressed in multiple cancers.
“We are delighted to be announcing the Biomedical Catalyst Fund support for our next pipeline TCR and its path towards the clinic in 2015,” said the company’s chief executive James Noble.
“We have a wide portfolio of cancer targets to be exploited in this way and our objective is to develop this pipeline of TCRs as rapidly as possible for the benefit of patients,” he adds.
The Biomedical Catalyst Fund has already handed out grants worth more than £120 million to over 100 projects since its launch in 2012.
David Willetts, minister for universities and science, praised Adaptimmune as “a classic example of an innovative bioscience company that the Biomedical Catalyst Fund is designed to support”.
Adam Hill
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