Anocca AB & Shinobi Therapeutics Announce Strategic Partnership to Develop Allogeneic TCR-T Cell Therapies in Oncology

Anocca AB and Shinobi Therapeutics recently announced a strategic partnership to use Shinobi’s proprietary immune evasive iPS-T cell platform with novel candidate TCRs, discovered and validated by Anocca, to develop a new class of off-the-shelf allogeneic TCR engineered iPS-T-cell therapies (TCR-iPS-T) for solid tumors.

“Anocca has made tremendous progress using our unique technology platform to systematically map cancer targets and build potent and highly specific TCR libraries to deliver personalized TCR-T treatments. As we prepare to progress our first gene-edited autologous TCR-T product into the clinic, we are excited to partner with Shinobi and work together to develop innovative off-the-shelf TCR-T cell therapies,” said Anocca’s CEO and Co-founder, Reagan Jarvis. “Shinobi’s Katana platform has the potential to offer treatment options for most cancer patients when combined with Anocca’s ability to systematically unlock the largely unexploited landscape of TCR-T targets.”

“Combining Shinobi’s immune evasive iPS-T cell platform with Anocca’s world-class TCR discovery platform will accelerate our mission of building a comprehensive pipeline of TCR and CAR-targeted off-the-shelf T-cell therapies,” added Dan Kemp, Shinobi’s CEO. “This is an ideal partnership between two emerging biotechs where the alignment of our technologies could realize a shared goal of making transformative TCR-iPS-T cell therapies and making them accessible to cancer patients on a global scale.”

Shinobi’s Katana technology specifically enables the efficient introduction of antigen-targeting TCR and/or CAR constructs into its immune evasive iPS-T cells in a plug-and-play manner. Anocca has developed a unique deep-tech discovery platform that uses programmable human cells to recreate and manipulate T-cell immunity and deliver libraries of highly specific, clinically deployable TCR candidates for the treatment of solid cancers. In this joint program, Shinobi and Anocca will work together to produce TCR engineered CD8 αβiPS-T-cells against validated cancer targets and deliver pre-clinical proof of concept. A successful outcome will pave the way for the development of novel off-the-shelf treatments in solid tumor indications for the broadest patient populations.

Autologous cell therapy uses immune cells derived from a patient that are engineered and transferred back to the same patient, thus avoiding rejection by the patients’ own immune system. The current gold standard, autologous manufacture of cell therapy limits the type of patients that can be treated, as the patient’s own immune cells are used as the source of T-cells to modify. Allogeneic cell therapy, utilizing iPS cell-derived immune cells, is an attractive alternative as production of allogeneic immune cells can be scaled up and made available off-the-shelf, without the need to modify a patient’s immune cells. However, a major challenge in current allogeneic approaches is allo-rejection, as the patients’ immune systems reject donor-derived and engineered cells as foreign invaders.

Shinobi Therapeutics is a biotechnology company developing a new class of off-the-shelf immune evasive iPSC-derived cell therapies. Based on the research of scientific Co-founders Shin Kaneko, MD, PhD, at Kyoto University and Tobias Deuse, MD, at University of California, San Francisco, Shinobi has created a new allogeneic CD8 αβiPS-T-cell platform that demonstrates comprehensive immune evasion from all arms of the immune system. For more information, visit www.shinobitx.com.

Anocca is a biotechnology company developing libraries of T-cell receptor-engineered T-cell (TCR-T) therapies to redefine the treatment of solid tumors. Its proprietary technologies have been designed to vastly expand TCR-T development, allowing the systematic generation of treatments for the broadest patient populations that equip the immune system against the most difficult to treat solid tumors. Anocca operates an advanced research and development infrastructure, underpinned by AnoccaOS, a custom software ecosystem, and in-house clinical manufacturing and process development facilities. Its unique discovery platform uses programmable human cells to recreate and manipulate T-cell immunity. For more information, visit www.anocca.com.