Biotech Startup Immage Biotherapeutics Gets Ready for Philadelphia Expansion
June 28, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Immage Biotherapeutics Corp , located in Bethesda, Maryland, is gearing up to expand its operations to the University City Science Center in Philadelphia.
The company, launched in 2015, is focused on stimulating the human immune system to fight cancer. Currently its pipeline is a DNA viral vaccine that targets tumors that express the Melanoma antigen family, (MAGE-A) antigen. It is being evaluated in triple negative breast cancer (TNBC).
On June 8, Immage announced that it had completed positive in vitro trials and was starting animal testing of several lead candidates. The company indicated it had four goals for the in vitro studies, and three had been successfully achieved.
“After completing in vitro trials, I’m even more confident in our team’s ability to transform groundbreaking research into a tangible patient therapy,” said Mahesh Narayanan, the company’s chief operating officer, in a statement. “All of our results were strong and conclusive—some even better than we anticipated. Right now we’re witnessing an immunotherapy revolution in cancer treatment, especially in the U.S., and we plan to play a big part for TNBC and other cancers as we begin our animal testing phase.”
The three achieved goals included the expression of MAGE A, which helped identify the best cell lines to work with for the animal studies, the verification of its plasmid delivery system, and proof that their current candidates showed a strong immune response. The fourth goal is “to test if the right immune cells are being created to kill the targeted cancer cells.”
Immage indicates that their timeline has unexpectedly accelerated, and it plans to file for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s investigational new drug (IND) program for a Phase I human trial in late 2017. It is also beginning another round of funding.
In March 2016, Immage announced it had raised an initial seed round of $500,000. The investor was Coventry International of Hong Kong.
Immage Biotherapeutics was co-founded and led by Mahesh Narayanan, chief operating officer, and Anton Dormer, chief scientific officer. It is an affiliate of PepVax, Inc. PepVax is an early stage life sciences technology development company. Narayanan is its chief executive officer and Dormer is its chief scientific officer.
Immage is currently working out of labs at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “Our plan is to expand our research collaboration to Philadelphia and New York City universities as well as start building a regulatory team and business development team using talents from the Tri-state area, at which point we will be getting a full office in Philadelphia,” Narayanan told Technical.ly.
It recently signed a contract for office space at the University City Science Center.
The company is utilizing its technology platform, ImMage Smart VLP vectors. This DNA-based therapeutic directly enhances the immune system by way of CD8+ and CD4+ lymphocytes. Studies of the vectors with anti-PD-L1 and/or anti-CTL4 are being evaluated for their potential to start a systemic immune response. They also have the potential of being standalone treatments with anti-PD-L1 and/or anti-CTL4 for tumors that express the MAGE-A antigen.