NextCure and LCB Present Preclinical Data on B7-H4 Antibody Drug Conjugate at AACR 2024

Poster presentation highlights strong safety and pharmacokinetic profiles for LNCB74

BELTSVILLE, Md., April 08, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NextCure, Inc. (Nasdaq: NXTC), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company committed to discovering and developing novel, first-in-class and best-in-class therapies to treat cancer, today announced the presentation of new preclinical data on LNCB74, a B7-H4-targeting antibody drug conjugate (ADC) developed in partnership with LigaChem Biosciences (LCB), formerly LegoChem Biosciences, (KOSDAQ: 141080), at the 2024 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA. The poster presentation highlights LNBC74’s promising preclinical safety and anti-tumor activity.

LNCB74 is an ADC utilizing LigaChem Biosciences’ proprietary site-specific conjugation and plasma-stable, cancer selectively activating linker technology to link monomethyl auristatin E (MMAE) to a B7-H4 targeting antibody in a drug-to-antibody ratio of 4 (DAR4). The presentation includes data demonstrating LNCB74’s high affinity and specificity for human B7-H4, a protein highly expressed on a range of solid tumors including breast, ovarian and endometrial cancers. LNCB74 was shown to specifically bind to B7-H4 expressing tumor cells and was rapidly internalized in a target-dependent manner. In addition, data showed that LNCB74 mediated potent cytotoxicity in B7-H4-positive cancer cells in vitro and demonstrated serum stability with a favorable pharmacokinetic (PK) activity in rodents. LNCB74 demonstrated significant tolerability in cynomolgus monkeys and showed strong anti-tumor activity in multiple cell-line derived (CDX) and patient-derived xenograft (PDX) tumor models in vivo. The increase in tolerability and strong efficacy is expected to translate into clinical activity of LNCB74.

“LNCB74 was developed through NextCure’s expertise in B7-H4 tumor biology and LCB’s ConjuAll^TM technology, resulting in a potent ADC with initial data demonstrating excellent tolerability and pharmacokinetics,” said Solomon Langermann, Ph.D., NextCure’s chief scientific officer. “These data underscore that LNCB74 is a promising candidate for the treatment of a variety of solid tumor indications. We look forward to continuing our work building a robust preclinical dataset to further support advancing this ADC to the clinic.”