Under the expanded collaboration, Seattle Genetics will develop and optimize certain methods suitable for manufacturing and testing PSMA ADC to support studies in humans. The new agreement is designed to accelerate development of this product by leveraging Seattle Genetics’ prior experience in ADC process development and testing.
Progenics is responsible for fees and milestone payments in addition to those already provided under the parties’ existing collaborative agreement established in June 2005.
“We are committed to developing PSMA-based immunotherapies for prostate cancer that are potentially less toxic and more active than existing treatments,” said Dr Paul Maddon, Progenics’ founder and CEO. “Prostate cancer patients with metastatic disease have the greatest unmet medical need, and we intend to initiate phase I clinical studies in this setting during 2007 with our fully human antibody-drug conjugate.”
Progenics also announced findings on its PSMA ADC program, which have been published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. This research showed that, in a well-recognized mouse model of human prostate cancer, PSMA ADC significantly prolonged overall survival up to nine-fold as compared to untreated animals.
Remarkably, established tumors in two of the five animals treated at the highest dose were eradicated and remained undetectable over 500 days through the completion of the study. In addition, no overt toxicity was observed in any of the treated animals.