Moderna gets into Claudin18.2

Today’s collaboration between Moderna and the Chinese group Carsgen surely owes at least something to the work of the former’s mRNA rival BioNTech in a similar field. Under the tie-up Carsgen’s satricabtagene autoleucel/CT041, a Car-T project directed against Claudin18.2, is to be studied in combination with Moderna’s Claudin18.2-encoding immunotherapeutic. The latter has no publicly revealed lab code at present, and indeed until today it wasn't obvious that Moderna was working on Claudin18.2 – an antigen that has quickly become the subject of a highly competitive space, where Astellas’s MAb zolbetuximab is expected to go before regulators this year, and where OncologyPipeline reveals no fewer than 58 clinical and 31 preclinical assets. But BioNTech’s separate work with BNT211, a Car-T Therapy against Claudin6, might be relevant. That company had been working on BNT211 for some time before finally scoring a clinical success at AACR 2022 – notably only after combining it with CARVac, a Claudin-6-encoding immunotherapeutic promoting the antigen’s expression on dendritic cells. It can only be guessed at present whether Moderna’s immunotherapeutic is similar conceptually to CARVac, but this seems likely. BioNTech is separately developing two anti-Claudin18.2 assets: BNT212, a Car-T therapy, and BNT141, an mRNA-based therapeutic.

A multitude of riches: clinical-stage assets against Claudin18.2

Source: OncologyPipeline.