Nascent Biotech, Manhattan BioSolutions partner to explore pritumumab conjugates

Nascent Biotech has entered into a research collaboration agreement with Manhattan BioSolutions to explore antibody-drug conjugates using Nascent’s lead clinical candidate pritumumab as the tumor-targeting antibody element. Pritumumab is a natural human antibody. This monoclonal antibody targets extracellular form of vimentin, a protein that has been linked to cancer growth and metastasis and is overexpressed in both brain and pancreatic cancers as well as other hard tumor cancers. PTB is a targeted immunotherapy that binds to vimentin in tumors and recruits the immune system to eliminate cancer cells. PTB has demonstrated a promising safety profile and preliminary efficacy in completed Phase I study in glioblastoma patients. Nascent has been recently cleared by the FDA to begin Phase II clinical trials for brain cancer. In preclinical experiments, PTB antibody has shown the capacity to cross the blood-brain barrier with the additional potential to transport conjugated drugs into brain tissues, and Nascent holds a patent covering this specialized delivery mechanism. Under the terms of the agreement, Manhattan Bio will perform PTB conjugations to industry standard linker-payloads and will evaluate the resulting ADCs in the in vitro cell assays. The most promising candidates will be prioritized for further development for the treatment of vimentin-positive and potential secondary targets in advanced or metastatic tumors.