New deal may help advance CAR T-cell therapy candidate for IgG4
Companies seek new treatments for immune-mediated inflammatory diseases
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Valerio Therapeutics is teaming up with Abivax to discover new treatments for immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. The deal will provide funding to help advance Valerio’s internal pipeline, including a cell therapy candidate for IgG4‑related disease (IgG4‑RD), an immune-mediated inflammatory disease.
“This collaboration brings together two highly complementary scientific capabilities: Abivax’s expertise in immune-mediated inflammatory diseases and Valerio’s advanced technology platforms,” Gilles Besin, PhD, CEO of Valerio, said in a company press release. “We believe this collaboration creates an exciting opportunity to explore innovative therapeutic approaches that leverage complementary expertise.”
Under the terms of the preliminary agreement, the two companies will be working together to identify and test potential treatments in preclinical settings. Depending on the results, Abivax may choose to further develop one or more therapies.
“We are pleased to collaborate with Valerio Therapeutics and to explore the potential of our complementary scientific capabilities,” said Marc de Garidel, CEO of Abivax. “We look forward to working together as the program progresses.”
IgG4 therapy candidate currently in preclinical testing
With the deal, Valerio is receiving an upfront payment of €2.4 million (about $2.7 million), with the potential for additional milestone payments as the programs progress. This will provide funding to support the advancement of Valerio’s pipeline of precision RNA-based therapies for different inflammatory diseases, including IgG4-RD and cancers.
“This transaction is aligned with Valerio’s strategy of advancing a focused portfolio of wholly owned therapeutic programs while complementing these efforts through partnerships and licensing transactions that leverage its platform capabilities and create additional value creation opportunities,” the release stated.
VTX-002 and the other two candidates in Valerio’s pipeline are currently in preclinical testing. The company said it hopes to move at least one of these programs into in-human clinical trials within the next two years.
IgG4-RD occurs when immune cells, particularly those producing the antibody type IgG4, infiltrate tissues. This results in inflammation and tissue scarring, leading to organ damage and causing IgG4-RD symptoms.
The company’s lead candidate for IgG4-RD, known as VTX-002, is a CAR T-cell therapy. T-cells are specialized immune cells that are able to kill other cells. In CAR T-cell therapy, these killer immune cells are modified to carry human-made molecular weapons called chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs. The CAR directs the T-cell to attack a specific target — somewhat like handing a detailed “wanted poster” to a highly trained agent.
CAR T-cell therapies were originally developed to fight cancer, but more recently they have begun to be explored as potential treatments for inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The basic idea is to equip T-cells with a CAR that targets proteins in disease-driving immune cells, so that the therapeutic CAR T-cells will kill those cells.
Traditionally, CAR T-cell therapy has involved collecting a patient’s T-cells, engineering them in a lab to equip them with a target-specific CAR, then infusing the modified cells back into the patient.
In vivo CAR T-cell therapies like VTX-002 instead aim to deliver to circulating T-cells in the body a specific genetic code that makes them produce the target-specific CAR. This allows the killer cells to be modified without the time-consuming and costly process of collecting them and engineering them in a lab.
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