BERLIN, Aug. 28 (Xinhua) -- German biotech company Immatics had entered into a strategic collaboration and option agreement with the U.S. pharmaceutical company Celegne "to develop novel adoptive cell therapies targeting multiple cancers," Immatics announced on Wednesday.
"This alliance leverages Immatics' excellence in developing adoptive cell therapies (ACT) and complements our proprietary clinical pipeline of ACT products and our strong portfolio of Bispecific products," said Harpreet Singh, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Immatics.
The two companies' collaboration would "enable the development of truly novel opportunities for patients with solid tumors," emphasized Immatics CEO Singh.
The cooperation with Celgene would focus exclusively on potential cell therapies in which special immune cells (T cells) of patients were genetically modified in the laboratory and subsequently reinjected, according to the German biotech company.
The U.S. pharmaceutical company Celgene would pay 75 million U.S. dollars upfront for access to new targets of cancer cells, so-called "target structures", researched by German biotech company Immatics.
Celgene would have to pay a further 505 million dollars per project, depending on clinical development success, noted the Tuebingen-based Immatics.
In addition, Immatics would be entitled to royalties once the therapies had been marketed and would have the option to participate in the clinical development of the products, the German biotech company announced.
"We are convinced that we have the best platform to identify new targets or target structures for cancer immunotherapy," said Immatics CEO Singh, who had been managing the German biotech company since the beginning of July.
The combination of Immatic's T-cell receptor engineered (TCR-T) programs and adoptive cell therapy (ACT) represented a "future breakthrough therapy," said Carsten Reinhardt, managing director and chief medical officer at Immatics, in a statement sent to Xinhua.
"Adoptive cell therapies and particularly CAR-T therapies have shown great potential in the treatment of cancers but this has been largely restricted so far to blood cancers," Immatics CEO Singh explained to Xinhua.
"We believe that novel targets/TCR pairs are the key to unlock solid cancers for immunotherapies," emphasized the German biotech's CEO.
According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in most recent cancer report, around half a million people in Germany were diagnosed with cancer every year while the absolute number of cancer cases had almost doubled since the 1970s.
