Avacta enters into 'groundbreaking' drug development partnership

Avacta Group's shares surged after the biotherapeutics developer agreed a co-development partnership with Bach BioSciences, a company commercialising the research of William Bachovchin, professor of developmental, chemical and molecular Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

The AIM-traded firm said the collaboration would develop a new class of ‘Affimer’ drug conjugate therapies with a novel mode of action, which combines Avacta's Affimer technology with drug conjugates developed at Tufts.

It said that in a “groundbreaking” co-invention with Tufts, the company had devised a new class of drug conjugate, which selectively releases a potent drug in the tumour microenvironment without requiring cellular internalisation of the conjugate as was otherwise the case with traditional antibody-drug conjugates.

Avacta and Tufts had jointly filed for broad patent protection for the concept.

The company said the patent covered Affimers, and a wide range of other binders, against oncology, viral and inflammatory targets that were not internalised rapidly enough to be useful in traditional antibody-drug conjugates. It also covered a “wide range” of drugs to which the binders can be conjugated.

The drug development partnership would develop the first example of the new class of drug conjugate, based on the combination of Affimer PD-L1 inhibitors and an I-DASH small molecule inhibitor, for which considerable clinical data had already been generated by the laboratory at Tufts.

Avacta said it retained exclusive rights to commercialise the novel drug conjugates.

“We are very excited indeed by this highly novel Affimer drug conjugate concept, the first example of which builds on our own PD-L1 programme and the world-class research of Professor Bachovchin at Tufts University School of Medicine, one of the top US medical schools and research institutes,” said Avacta chief executive officer Dr Alastair Smith.

“We believe that this new drug conjugate platform is transformational for the business.

“From our initial discussions with several large pharmaceutical companies, it is clear that there is significant interest and there is certainly the potential for partnering at an early stage once we have the appropriate supporting data from the collaboration with Professor Bachovchin.”

Smith said broad patent protection for the dual mode of action therapy would be “extremely valuable”, as it could be applied to a range of cancers for which patient response to checkpoint inhibitors alone was not high.

“The initial embodiment of the concept, which uses a PD-L1 Affimer, becomes Avacta's second major drug development programme alongside the PD-L1/LAG-3 bispecific blockade.

“This will maximise the value we deliver to shareholders from the investment in the PD-L1 programme since 2015 and we very much look forward to updating the market on the progress made in the coming months.”