ImMAGE Biotherapeutics (OTCMKTS: IMMG), an early-stage biotechnology company, announced today that its immunotherapy successfully passed early toxicology and efficacy studies. The company is harnessing the power of the immune system to target a specific protein, MAGE A, in an effort to find a better treatment for triple negative breast cancer.
4 weeks of treatment in transgenic mice, the lead candidate was able to show very little toxicity in a full toxicology report of various organs. Cytotoxic T-cells were removed from the mice to test the efficacy ex vivo to check for targeted response against MAGE-A positive cancer cells. There was a significant increase in cell death of MAGE-A positive tumor cells compared to MAGE-A negative tumor cells.ImMAGE Biotherapeutics is in the process of conducting preclinical development and plans to file an IND in 2018 to start phase 1 clinical trials.
ImMAGE Biotherapeutics targets to move the candidate into human trials in late 2018/early 2019."We are very satisfied with the early in vivo validation of our in vitro results. Both the efficacy and the low toxicity were what we were expecting, but it is good to the see the results reflect that," said Mahesh Narayanan, COO of ImMAGE Biotherapeutics. "If all goes well, we hope to be able to move the candidates to the next level of research in the next month."
The CSO of ImMAGE Biotherapeutics, Dr. Anton Dormer, noted "These results will help us move forward with our conversations with the FDA as well as prepare us to start our clinical trials next year. We will have to validate these results in GLP conditions using GMP-grade products before our IND filing."
