Artiva Biotherapeutics and Affimed Announce Platform-to-Platform R&D Collaboration for Targeted Off-the-Shelf NK Cell Therapies - Seite 2

“The collaboration with Artiva represents a visionary approach which can lead to a new class of drugs providing a potent and targeted innate immune system-cytotoxic response,” said Dr. Adi Hoess, Affimed’s Chief Executive Officer. “Our ROCK platform has been proven to rapidly and predictably generate a set of diverse innate cell engagers, with consistent profiles in tumor lysis and safety making our ICE molecules optimally suited for combination therapy with NK cells.”

Using its ROCK (Redirected Optimized Cell Killing) platform, Affimed has developed a novel pipeline of ICE products; tetravalent, bispecific therapeutics specific for tumor targets such as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and CD30 and maintaining high affinity CD16A-binding for enhanced activation of innate immunity, inducing both antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) and antibody-dependent cellular phagocytosis (ADCP).

Artiva’s AB-101 is a universal NK cell therapy for use in combination with monoclonal antibodies or novel modalities such as NK cell engagers. In preclinical studies, AB-101 has demonstrated enhanced antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity with a variety of therapeutic antibodies. The company plans to enter the clinic this year with AB-101, assessing monotherapy safety and efficacy and subsequent therapeutic potential in combination with an anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody for the treatment of relapsed refractory B-cell lymphoma. The first batches of AB-101 drug product, manufactured at very large scale and cryopreserved in infusion-ready media, have already been produced for clinical use.

About Artiva Biotherapeutics: Scaling NK Cell Therapy for Cancer

Artiva’s mission is to deliver to cancer patients highly effective cellular immunotherapies that are also safe and immediately accessible. Artiva’s pipeline of universal and targeted NK cell therapies leverages the innate anti-tumor biology and safety features of NK cells. The therapies are optimized for enhanced efficacy through chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) or therapeutic antibody combination therapy. Artiva’s pipeline leverages a manufacturing platform that supports large-scale production and cryopreservation of off-the-shelf allogeneic NK cell therapies and proprietary CAR-NK technologies to augment therapeutic activity. Artiva’s platform incorporates cell expansion, activation, and engineering technology developed by the company’s corporate partner, GC LabCell, a member of the GC family of companies, one of the Republic of Korea’s leading biopharmaceutical groups. Artiva is headquartered in San Diego. For more info, please visit www.artivabio.com.