OncoC4 creates a bispecific buzz

OncoC4’s all-stock acquisition of AcroImmune will spark interest thanks to being based around a newly disclosed anti-VEGF x PD-1 antibody. In reality, however, the transaction is more mundane, merely tidying up the two companies’ corporate structure.

Both groups have the same scientific co-founders and similar shareholder bases, and perhaps the most important part of the deal is that it will see the projects developed by AcroImmune, a Chinese company, taken forward under the banner of OncoC4, a private US business. Those projects are AI-071, now revealed as a broad Siglec antagonist, and the VEGF x PD-1 bispecific AI-081.

MAbs combining activity on VEGF with PD-(L)1 have a high profile at present because of excitement around Akeso/Summit’s ivonescimab. Also active here are BioNTech, with the Biotheus-originated BNT327, and Instil Bio with SYN-2510, licensed from ImmuneOnco in August.

However, the presence of AI-081 as a competitor here wasn’t widely known until the OncoC4 deal was announced on Wednesday, and AcroImmune’s website disclosed AI-071 as its only pipeline project. Little is known about the structure of AI-081 beyond its activity on VEGF and PD-1, but OncoC4 says it plans to file a US IND for it by the end of this year.

Oncoimmune

The link between the two entities that are now being merged lies in a third company, Oncoimmune, which was founded by Professors Yang Liu and Pan Zheng. Liu and Zheng are also the founders of AcroImmune Group.

Oncoimmune was sold to Merck & Co for $425m in cash in 2020, for the Covid-19 therapeutic MK-7110. That project was discontinued in phase 3 the following year, but in the meantime Oncoimmune’s oncology assets were spun into a new entity – OncoC4. These assets include another Siglec-directed MAb, ONC-841, which has activity specifically on Siglec-10 and started phase 1 this year.

That might be OncoC4’s clinical lead, but the group’s highest-profile asset is gotistobart, a pH-sensitive anti-CTLA-4 MAb that was licensed to BioNTech for $200m. Gotistobart showed some promise in ovarian cancer at this year’s ESMO, and OncoC4 and BioNTech have taken it into a phase 3 trial in second-line NSCLC.

The BioNTech link, and that company’s separate deal with Biotheus for BNT327, highlight a key irony of the enlarged pipeline now under the OncoC4 banner: in VEGF x PD-(L)1 OncoC4 now has a key pipeline asset, one of whose main competitors, BNT327, is being developed by its most important partner.

How they are related

Source: OncologyPipeline & company information.