Novel Solid Tumor Cancer Portfolio
Minerva Biotechnologies is developing cancer immunotherapies and cancer drugs to target 80% of solid tumors and to prevent cancer metastasis. As a company, we are modality agnostic – our anti-cancer MUC1* targeting antibodies can be used as the targeting head of a CAR T, the basis for a bispecific antibody or antibody-drug conjugate, etc. Our lead therapeutic is a CAR T, but we can see a role for other modalities in different patients.
Cancer Immunotherapy
The single chain fragment variable (scFv) from our lead anti-MUC1* antibody (called C2) is the targeting head for the anti-MUC1* CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) for T cell immunotherapy currently in the clinic.
Our CAR T therapeutics will attack solid tumors that are MUC1* positive. This represents approximately 80% of all cancers, including over 90% of breast cancers and very high percentages of patients with ovarian cancers, pancreatic cancers and lung cancers. The success of other CAR T companies has been limited to blood cancers.
Autologous CAR T Therapy
CAR T stands for Chimeric Antigen Receptor T Cell therapy. Autologous means that a patient’s own blood is used to create the product and then reinfused back into the patient (as opposed to allogeneic, where a bank of cells is created from a donor and every patient gets cells from that donor bank). In short, the patient undergoes leukapheresis, a process by which white blood cells are removed from the patient. The cells are then taken to the manufacturing facility, where they are reprogrammed to recognize and attack MUC1* on cancer cells, and reinfused back into the patient.
Please see the “Clinical Trials” section on the “Cancer Therapeutics” menu for more information about our lead CAR T clinical trial.
Next Generation CAR T
CAR T cells are a great way to fight cancer, but there are limitations. One of these limitations is exhaustion – after fighting cancer cells, they get ‘exhausted.’ They stay in the general area, but lack energy and stop fighting. We have a couple of methods to keep T cells active. One is by using the 1XX technology developed at Sloan Kettering. Another method is when we reprogram the cells to recognize cancer, we also have it secrete a protein that inhibits exhaustion. We are currently developing these approaches and are on track to file INDs over the next year.
Antibody Approaches
Anti-metastasis Antibody targeting NME7AB
Minerva has also discovered a metastatic growth factor that binds to MUC1*, called NME7AB. This metastatic factor should not be expressed in adults except in testis. However, we have found it in every metastatic cancer we have looked at.
Interestingly, when human cancer cells are grown in this recombinant human metastatic factor, they are able to form tumors in mice from the implantation of as few as 50 cancer cells. This indicates that they are metastatic since tumor formation in an animal usually requires 4-6 million human cancer cells.
Injecting the metastatic factor into these mice made these human cancers metastasize to the same organs and bone as the human cancer would metastasize. This has never been done before.
We have a panel of antibodies against this metastatic factor, and have selected specific antibodies that block this growth factor and block the transition from a regular cancer cell to a metastatic cancer cell. Our optimized antibodies specifically block the metastatic factor but not related family members that are expressed in adults.
Antibody-Drug Conjugates and Bispecific Antibodies
Minerva’s panel of anti-MUC1* antibodies can also be used to develop ADCs or BsAbs. ADCs (Antibody-Drug Conjugate) is an antibody that has a toxin attached to it. When the antibody binds the cancer cell, it is internalized and releases the toxin inside the cancer cell, killing it. BsAbs are bispecific antibodies – the antibody consists of a part that binds to the cancer cells, and the other part binds to something else (usually CD3, which is a membrane protein on T cells). Minerva is not generating ADC or BsAb candidates, but we are looking for partners that have these technologies to license our MUC1*-targeting antibodies for their preparations.