The new collaboration extends the use of the company’s proprietary ATLAS (AnTigen Lead Acquisition System) platform for the rapid discovery of T cell antigens to cancer immunotherapy approaches.
This collaboration includes Dr Darren Higgins of Harvard Medical School Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology, and the team of Drs Stephen Hodi and Glenn Dranoff from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Dr Higgins originally devised the ATLAS technology. The biologic and anti-tumor activities of anti-CTLA-4 (anti- cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen-4) antibody therapy have been investigated by Drs. Hodi and Dranoff.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the anti-CTLA-4 antibody therapy for the treatment of advanced melanoma.
Sponsored by Ludwig Trust, the collaboration with Genocea is aimed at learning more about the immune responses stimulated with this treatment.
In a Phase I study of this antibody therapy, certain subjects responded very favorably, while investigators did not see a clinically meaningful response with other subjects.
Dr Higgins’ team will create a cancer antigen protein library for screening in ATLAS and the Dana-Farber team will obtain peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from a subset of positive responders from the Phase I trial participants treated with the anti-CTLA-4 antibody.
ATLAS platform will then be used by Genocea to screen the protein library against the patient-derived immune cells to identify a small number of highly relevant T-cell antigens for further testing.
Genocea Biosciences president and CEO Chip Clark noted ATLAS has proven its value for the rapid discovery of promising vaccine antigens in the field of infectious diseases, enabling Genocea to take four programs in three infectious diseases from start to animal proof-of-concept in less than three years.
"We believe this collaboration speaks to the promise of our ATLAS technology to discover a subset of antigens relevant to positive anti-tumor T cell responses in melanoma patients, which might form the basis for an effective immunotherapeutic. In addition, the information gained through this effort should provide useful data for patient-stratification in clinical trials, as well as potential applications for monitoring patients post-treatment," Clark added.