Lilai and nextcure founded by Chen Liping to create the next generation of tumor immunotherapy

On November 5, Eli Lilly and company, a US pharmaceutical giant, and nextcure announced their cooperation in the discovery and development of new immune tumor drugs, aiming to make use of nextcure's proprietary find-io Gamma New tumor targets were found on the platform According to the terms of the agreement, Lilly and nextcure will each obtain the antibody option generated by the exclusive license agreement Lilly will pay nextcure $40 million - including $25 million in advance and $15 million in equity investment Nextcure will be eligible for milestone payments and royalties if Lilly is able to further develop and commercialize any drugs in the partnership Nextcure > > At the beginning of 2016, nextcure completed round a financing of US $67 million The company, which was spun off by Yale University, has a technical license from the scientific founder Dr Chen Liping's laboratory Dr Chen is a pioneer in immunooncology He and his team have found many new immune related targets, including the PD-1 / PD-L1 pathway Left: Michael Richman, right: Chen Liping (photo source: interwest partners, Yale) > > > find-io Gamma Nextcure, a platform, is developing the next generation of tumor immunotherapy to address limited treatment options for patients who are unresponsive to standard therapy or existing immunotherapy FIND-IO Gamma The technology aims to identify new cell surface molecular interactions that drive functional immune responses in tumor microenvironment and other disease sites The company has developed proprietary methods for functional assessment of immune pathways in primary immune cells from healthy donors and patients with various diseases, and for the establishment of cell lines from immune and non immune cell lineages, including T-cell subsets, monocytes, macrophage subsets and cancer cell lines FIND-IO Gamma At present, nextcure has identified several positive and negative immunomodulators for bone marrow cells and T cells From these findings, the company is developing therapeutic methods that can intervene and regulate the immune cell interaction within the tumor microenvironment to restore antitumor activity In addition, nextcure is leveraging and leveraging its current find-io Gamma Technology is applied to functional screening methods to identify new targets from a variety of therapeutic areas, including autoimmune and neurology, so that the next generation of immunotherapy can enter fields other than oncology >>>>Nc318: nextcure is the first drug to enter the clinical tumor microenvironment where there are molecular interactions related to tumor cell "immune evasion" (immunosuppression), such as immunocheckpoint CTLA-4, PD-1, PD-L1 At present, the most popular immunotherapy is PD-1 / PD-L1 antibody, which has significantly improved the prognosis of patients and changed the paradigm of cancer treatment In some cancer species (such as lung cancer), first-line treatment has also been added However, a large proportion of patients have low response rate to PD-1 / PD-L1 antibody Therefore, it is urgent to develop the next generation immunotherapy as soon as possible for more patients Nc318 is nextcure's first antibody candidate drug to enter clinical trials, marking an exciting milestone for the next generation of immune drug program Recently, nc318 for solid tumor 1 / 2 phase clinical trials have been launched Nc318 is a siglec-15 (S15) antibody Blocking S15 may reduce the immunosuppression and normalize the immune response, so as to generate clinically relevant anti-tumor immune response The results show that S15 regulates immunosuppression in a way independent of PD-1 / PD-L1 pathway, suggesting that nc318 may have potential for use in PD-L1 negative patients Nextcure R & D pipeline (photo source: nextcure) Lilly: the traditional pharmaceutical giants of tumor immunotherapy have joined in the development of tumor immunotherapy drugs one after another in order to get a big cake in the huge market Bristol Myers Squibb, MSD, Roche, Pfizer, Merck.. Lilly basically did not appear in the initial competition station, but the company has been sending relevant signals In April, Lilly hired Leena Gandhi, M.D., from the Perlmutter cancer center at Langone health, New York University, to conduct its immune oncology research earlier this year Dr Gandhi played a leading role in a number of phase 1 to phase 3 clinical trials, including the keytruda combination therapy of mosadon for the keynote-189 study in NSCLC patients Leena Gandhi (picture source: IASLC lung cancer news) in May this year, Lilly purchased armo Biosciences, an immune tumor company, for $1.6 billion Pegilodecakin (am0010), the main candidate product of armo company, is a long-acting recombinant interleukin-10 (peg-il-10), which can activate the tumor reactive cytotoxic CD8 + T cells of patients, so that CD8 + T cells can mediate the tumor elimination effect of immune tumor preparations Lilly's tumor immunotherapy development pipeline also includes a number of candidate products, including PD-L1 antibody, Tim-3 antibody and type 2 multi kinase inhibitor At home and abroad, PD-1 / L1 checkpoint inhibitors have formed a trend of clustering, and major pharmaceutical companies are competing for research and development, seizing the market It takes a lot of money and manpower to stand out from the thousands of troops, as well as to face the market that has been divided into few after the product goes on the market Differentiation, or the way to survive The next generation of immunotherapy uses new tumor targets We hope to break through the current dilemma and inject new energy into tumor therapy.