April 18, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Cambridge, Mass.-based Enumeral Biomedical Holdings announced today that it had inked a licensing and transfer deal with Boston-based Pieris Pharmaceuticals and Germany-based Pieris Pharmaceuticals GmbH.
Pieris is paying Enumeral an upfront licensing fee of $250,000 related to Enumeral’s anti-PD-1 antibody program ENUM 388D4 for immuno-oncology applications. Enumeral is giving Pieris a sequence and related data regarding the 388D4 family of anti-PD-1 antibodies. Pieris, under the agreement, can extend the agreement for an additional $750,000 maintenance fee by May 31, 2016. If Pieris chooses not to extend, the deal and license expires.
The goal is for Pieris to develop and commercialize various fusion proteins based on Pieris’ Anticalins class of proteins and Enumeral’s antibodies.
If the deal continues and if commercial products are developed, Pieris will pay Enumeral developmental milestone payments up to $37.8 million, as well as net sales milestones up to $67.5 million. There will also be low-to-lower middle single digit royalties on net sales based on net sales in specific years.
“We are excited that Pieris has decided to work with our antibody sequences, and we are encouraged that these sequences could become part of a novel class of therapeutics based on Pieris’ Anticalin platform,” said Cokey Nguyen, Enumeral’s vice president of research and development, in a statement. “Enumeral has been able to generate antibodies using our proprietary platform technology in a very efficient manner, and this transaction is further validation of the Enumeral approach. We look forward to working with Pieris as we pursue our mutual interests under the License Agreement.”
Enumeral also announced today that it is presenting research findings on its anti-PD-1 antibodies in a poster presentation at the AACR Annual Meeting 2016 held in New Orleans. Abstract #2224 is titled “Discovery, Characterization and Development of a New Class of Therapeutic Anti-PD-1 Antibody.”
Of the deal, Stephen Yoder, Pieris’ president and chief executive officer, said in a statement, “Gaining access to Enumeral’s valuable PD-1 antibody IP not only enables Pieris to leverage its antibody-Anticalin multispecifics capabilities with a cornerstone immune checkpoint inhibitor, but also brings a high level of intra-pipeline synergy, including with Pieris’ lead CD137 bispecific immune costimulator candidate PRS-343. This license gives Pieris an opportunity to independently develop anti-PD-1 antibody-Anticalin multispecific immune checkpoint inhibitors as next generation cancer immunotherapies.”
Pieris is also presenting data at the AARC Meeting. Poster #556 is titled, “Costimulatory T cell engagement by the HER2/CD137 bispecific PRS-343 leads to strong anti-tumor effect in humanized mouse model.”
PRS-343 is a bispecific fusion protein that targets CD137 and HER2. Research has indicated that CD137 is a promising therapeutic target in cancer, but current antibody approaches typically don’t try to find tumor-mediated activation, and as a result, may have adverse toxicity and a limited window of activity because of activation of peripheral T cells and NK cells. PRS-343 is designed to overcome that limitation.
