Avacta enters licence agreement with Point Biopharma

The AIM-traded company said the radiopharmaceutical market was expected to grow to $15bn by 2025, adding that there was a “substantial opportunity” to grow faster if safety and tolerability of treatments could be improved.

It described Point Biopharma as a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company, focussed on developing radioligands as precision medicines for the treatment of cancer.

Avacta said its proprietary preCISION chemistry could be used to modify a radioligand drug to form a tumour-activated prodrug.

The prodrug form is inactive in circulation until it enters the tumour micro-environment, where it is activated by an enzyme called fibroblast activation protein (FAP) that is present in high abundance in most solid tumours, but not in healthy tissue.

It explained that its preCISION technology thus had the potential to improve tolerability and achieve better clinical outcomes for patients when compared to standard radiopharmaceuticals, by targeting the radioligand treatment more specifically to cancer cells.

The agreement would provide Point with an exclusive licence to the preCISION technology for use in the first radiopharmaceutical prodrug the company intended to develop, and a non-exclusive licence to the platform for the development of a broader pipeline of FAP-activated radiopharmaceuticals.

Under the terms of the deal, Avacta would receive an upfront fee and development milestones for the first radiopharmaceutical prodrug totalling $9.5m (£6.98m).

It would also receive milestone payments for subsequent radiopharmaceutical prodrugs of up to $8m each, a royalty on sales of FAP-activated radiopharmaceuticals by Point, and a percentage of any sublicensing income received by Point.

“The clinical and commercial rationale for our preCISION prodrug platform is to improve the safety and efficacy of many existing drugs, as well as generating a pipeline of new and novel cancer therapies,” said chief executive officer Alastair Smith.

“In oncology, we believe that this approach will result in better response rates for monotherapies, and a greater safety margin, to enable their use with a larger patient population and as part of combination therapies.”

Smith said the in-house development of AVA6000 pro-doxorubicin, the first of its preCISION chemotherapy prodrugs for which it recently submitted a clinical trial authorisation filing in the UK to begin clinical trials in 2021, had already generated “significant interest”.

“The potential of the preCISION platform to significantly improve outcomes for patients treated with existing cancer therapies through improved safety, tolerability and dosing regimens is enormous.

“In addition, Avacta is combining the preCISION technology with the ‘Affimer’ platform to create an entirely new class of proprietary TMAC drug conjugates.”

At 0840 GMT, shares in Avacta Group were down 3.43% at 135.2p.