Helping the body to fight cancer
Cancer is still the second most common harbinger of death for mankind. Lung, breast, and colon cancer together take more than a million lives worldwide per year. Recent advances in immunotherapy allow for the first time fostering the body’s own immune system to fight cancer.
Our therapeutic antibodies are engineered to simultaneously bind to two different antigens, so-called bispecific antibodies (bsAb). The two antigens can be either located on one cell type, e.g., a tumor cell, or two different cell types, e.g., on a tumor cell on the one and an immune effector cell on the other side. An example for the first case is low affinity binding to CD47 and high affinity binding to a tumor- associated antigen (TAA) to effectively increase phagocytosis by blocking the SIRPα-CD47 “don’t eat me signal” (SIRPα, e.g., expressed on macrophages). An active constant region (Fc) of the bsAb can bind macrophages and natural killer cells and induce increased antibody-dependent cell-mediated phagocytosis and cytotoxicity (ADCP and ADCC).
Direct binding to a different cell type, the second case, is frequently designed to attract and retarget T cells to kill tumor cells (T cell bispecific antibodies (TCB), respectively T cell engagers). Clinical activity of TCBs is, however, limited, in part by insufficient T-cell activation, dose-limiting toxicities like cytokine release syndrome (CRS), steep dose-response curve, or immunogenicity. Combination with TAA-targeted CD28-costimulation is expected to increase T-cell activity and tumor cell killing, prolong the duration of response, and provide a better controllable dose response (including a reduced risk of developing CRS).
To help the body to fight cancer, we in LamKap Bio group research, develop, manufacture, and test a set of fully human bispecific antibodies targeting malignant cells in solid cancer.
