Sorrento Secures Exclusive License From Mayo Clinic for Antibody-Drug-Nanoparticle Albumin-Bound Immune Complex (ADNIC) Platform

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: SRNE, "Sorrento") today announced it has entered into an exclusive license agreement with Mayo Clinic for a potential breakthrough technology platform that is capable of generating a great diversity of stable antibody-drug-nanoparticle albumin-bound (nab) immune complexes (ADNICs) targeting many types of human diseases including various solid and liquid tumors. The ADNIC is the next generation in antibody drug conjugate (ADC) technology that potentially addresses limitations of current ADC technology, such as complex manufacturing processes (e.g., antibody-chemotherapy linkers), which can affect drug half-life, stability and tumor accessibility, and result in high cost of goods (COGs). The ADNIC platform is currently generating clinical data at Mayo Clinic through clinical trials with multiple investigational products in a variety of cancers including ovarian, endometrial, and multiple lymphoma sub-types. These trials will continue and are expected to be expanded.

The ADNIC technology, developed at Mayo Clinic, offers many potential advantages:

• Optimizes the likelihood that a chemotherapeutic payload will be preferentially delivered to the specific, targeted cancer cell type (supported by existing preclinical pharmacokinetic (PK) data);
• Potentially more efficient and effective than traditional ADCs because ADNICs allow for the entire ADNIC complex to be absorbed into the targeted cancer cell rather than just the chemotherapeutic payload; and
• Uses non-covalent binding to external albumin sites to potentially facilitate delivery of both a monoclonal antibody and chemotherapeutic payload directly to the tumor and its microenvironment.

The ADNIC technology potentially eliminates the need to use covalent linker technology by incorporating therapeutically or immunologically active antibodies in a reversible manner with a nanoparticle composed of albumin and a payload of one or more drugs.

The platform has indicated clinical benefits in an FDA-cleared investigator-sponsored trial at Mayo Clinic under the supervision of Svetomir Markovic, M.D., Ph.D., a medical oncologist and hematologist. Preliminary results suggest that patients have experienced clinical benefit from receiving prototype product candidates that utilize the ADNIC technology developed by Dr. Markovic and Wendy Navalo at Mayo Clinic, including objective responses in heavily pre-treated patients with advanced cancers.