Traditionally, cancer treatment has relied on aggressive methods such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. However, a new paradigm has emerged with cancer immunotherapy, offering a more nuanced approach. Unlike conventional methods, which directly attack cancer cells, immunotherapy harnesses the body’s own immune system to combat the disease.
Current approaches in immunotherapy involve techniques such as vaccine development and cell therapy. Still, these methods face challenges, including difficulty generating a robust immune response in all patients and the development of resistance over time.
To address the limitations in current cancer treatment, VerImmune is developing a novel cancer treatment called ‘Anti-tumour Immune Redirection’ (AIR) that aims to revolutionise the Immuno-Oncology market, offering new treatment possibilities for patients facing limited options or resistance to current cancer therapies.
According to VerImmune CEO and Founder Joshua Wang, the basic premise of this novel treatment paradigm is the ability to trick the body’s pre-existing immune memory into seeing cancer cells as a past viral infection, which might be gained through childhood vaccination. As a result, the body already knows how to fight it, and this past memory response is redirected to killing the tumour.
“Since everyone has a pre-existing immunity to certain virus infections or vaccines, VerImmune’s AIR approach is thus broadly applicable to a wide population of cancer patients irrespective of where they are based globally since certain infections or childhood vaccines are universal and/or mandatory. Further, these past viral or childhood memory immune responses are often life-long and very protective and present in the body,” he explains in an email to e27.
Also Read: Mirxes lands US$50M to take its cancer early detection solutions to new markets
In this interview, Wang explains in detail how VerImmune develops this solution and the company’s recent milestones. Check out this edited excerpt of the conversation.
Can you tell us how you develop these solutions?
VerImmune is realising AIR via our foundational proprietary platform technology, virus-inspired Particles (ViP). The ViP particles self-assemble from 60 copies of a synthetic protein inspired by a certain virus and were developed internally at VerImmune.
Now, synthetic proteins are essentially lab-made versions of the building blocks found in nature. They are engineered to resemble natural proteins.
The ViP, in turn, serves as a delivery technology designed to target and bind to specific receptors found only on tumour cells but not healthy normal cells. This means it can discriminate between cancerous and healthy cells with precision.
Who are your users? How do you acquire them?
Our ultimate goal is to use our ViP in different ways to treat different diseases. Oncology is currently our primary focus, and based on our innovative AIR approach, we hope to offer new treatment possibilities for patients facing limited options.
While our end users are patients, we recognise that as an early-stage biotechnology company, our customers are pharmaceutical companies, as they are the ones with the necessary channels and resources to bring a drug to market. Further, a significant fraction of the therapeutic pipeline in many big pharmaceutical companies originates from early stage startups like ours.
Also Read: How is AI transforming the future of cancer diagnosis
As such, one of our key focuses is generating strong, compelling data to demonstrate how our ViPs can fulfil unmet needs in cancer treatment to attract pharmaceutical interest and foster potential partnerships or collaborations. Importantly, these relationships allow us to tap into pharmaceutical expertise and resources efficiently, helping us achieve value-creating milestones.
An example of this is the Amgen Golden ticket award, whereby VerImmune is gaining mentorship to help improve our lead therapeutic programme in oncology and explore new therapeutic areas such as nucleic delivery. To support VerImmune in these two vastly different therapeutic early-stage drug development programs, VerImmune was matched with two specific subject matter mentors from Amgen who would share their expertise via regularly scheduled meetings.
This mentorship is particularly crucial given the current landscape of the Singapore biotech ecosystem. While the ecosystem is evolving and Singapore is very international in supporting the growth of biotech startups, there remains a lack of experienced biotech professionals or teams who have successfully navigated early-stage development.
The Amgen Golden Ticket allows early-stage start-ups based in Singapore, especially those with limited connections and experience, to gain access to experts from a world-class pharmaceutical company.
What important milestones have you made recently?
VerImmune raised US$3.1 million in mid-2023, following an initial US$2.5 million raise in 2022 and a successful FDA-preIND meeting, which helped the company prepare better and comply with regulatory requirements. VerImmune also previously secured pharmaceutical partnerships with global established pharma such as Janssen Biologics and Fosun Pharmaceuticals, thus showing commercial interest in our novel technology.
Also Read: Harnessing the power of AI to help improve gastric cancer detection
Beyond Oncology, we are also investigating other areas with high unmet needs via the utilisation of ViPs with novel properties and/or payloads that exert highly disruptive mechanisms of action. To this end, we’ve decided to focus on furthering the development of our ViP platform in Singapore.
In 2023, we were awarded the Second Amgen X NSG Biolabs Golden Ticket Award, which allowed us to secure physical space, infrastructure and
residency at NSG BioLabs to establish our presence within Asia Pacific with Singapore as our new regional headquarters. This accelerated our plans to establish a cost-efficient presence quickly as the golden ticket provided credibility.
Being part of NSG BioLabs’ ecosystem has been invaluable for us. It has enabled us to rub shoulders with and learn from other startups that are further along in their journey, providing us with unique insights and experiences that have accelerated our growth.
Following this, we signed a long-term research partnership with A*STAR, specifically the Bioprocessing Technology Institute (BTI), a research institute in Singapore with integrated capabilities to assist the industry in accelerating process innovation in biomanufacturing. This focused on advancing our ViP Platform Development via developing novel manufacturing and analytical solutions with the team at BTI. With this ongoing research and the available space, we are now building up a local platform development team, working with the local biotech ecosystem to identify possible candidates.
What major plans do you have this year?
2024 is a year of execution. We intend to focus on delivering our lead AIR programme and gain more traction regarding our growth plans in Singapore.
Specifically for the Lead AIR-ViP program, our lead Immuno-Oncology product candidate is VERI-101, which utilises the ViP platform to harness the cellular immune memory responses from prior cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection to fight cancer.
Also Read: AUM Biosciences bags US$27M Series A to advance its targeted cancer therapies
Following our meeting with the FDA last year to understand the path ahead and raise some additional capital, we intend to execute the next stages of our advance development (GLP toxicology, clinical manufacturing) to enable the filing of an IND for VERI-101, which will be critical to initiating human phase 1 trials.
In parallel, we hope to mature ongoing efforts in Singapore, such as complete lead optimisation of potential new ViP platform candidates from our ongoing collaboration with BTI-A*STAR, achieve ‘boots-on-the-ground’ in Singapore, and identify additional collaborators within the booming Singapore/Asia Biotech ecosystem as part of our strategic platform development plans.
—
Image Credit: VerImmune
The post VerImmune wants to help tackle cancer by teaching existing immunity to attack cancerous cells instead appeared first on e27.