Triple meeting 2024 – plenary focus

A plenary session at the upcoming Triple meeting will focus on new drugs in development, and could thrust the private US biotech Aktis Oncology even further onto investors’ radars. The company last month closed a $175m series B raise, and the Triple plenary will highlight AKY-1189, a radioconjugate targeting the Nectin-4 antigen.

Elsewhere, a plenary specifically on late-breaking abstracts will yield the first clinical data for Tyra Biosciences’ FGFR3 inhibitor TYRA-300, as well as data on IDE397, the Ideaya MAT2A inhibitor that recently impressed in the clinic despite being handed back by GSK. Late-breaking posters will be in focus too, if only for revealing hitherto undisclosed molecules.

One of these, for instance, is LY4175408, apparently Lilly’s PTK7 inhibitor; the company has not previously disclosed a presence in this mechanism, where Pfizer/AbbVie’s ADC cofetuzumab pelidotin was discontinued in phase 1 last year. And little is known about VRise’s VRTX531, an inhibitor of USP1, a mechanism that has suffered setbacks with Roche’s RO7623066 and Tango’s TNG348.

Triple (EORTC-NCI-AACR symposium) meeting presentations include a major focus on the RAF/RAS/KRAS field, and the key abstracts here are covered separately.

Aktis windfall

For Aktis the $175m windfall came after an $84m series A in 2022. Earlier this year the company teamed up with Lilly to work on radiopharmaceuticals in a deal worth $60m up front.

The company calls AKY-1189 a “miniprotein” radioconjugate, and the Triple abstract reveals this to use the alpha emitter actinium-225. Work on this project, seemingly Aktis’s lead, predates the Lilly tie-up. 

Private biotechs will feature in a late-breaking poster session, with presentations including Circle Pharma’s cyclin A/B-RxL inhibitor CID-078, which recently became that company’s first clinical-stage project.

Also featuring is the small-molecule HER2 inhibitor VRN101099, which might be ORIC-114, the project the listed group Oric Pharmaceuticals licensed from South Korea’s Voronoi in 2020.

Selected presentations from 2024 EORTC-NCI-AACR symposium

While the Triple meeting is mostly about very early-stage projects with novel mechanisms, it does include some clinical trial presentations, and this year’s instalment will put a spotlight on one of the few HIF-2α inhibitors in development beyond Merck & Co’s marketed Welireg.

That molecule is casdatifan, which some analysts are starting to see as the jewel in the pipeline of Arcus Biosciences, a company more closely associated with TIGIT and a deal with Gilead. So far casdatifan has only yielded a handful of case reports, so the Triple data, from its Arc-20 trial in renal cancer, will be closely watched.

And a late-breaking plenary will see data on Ideaya’s IDE397, which earlier this year showed a 39% response rate in 18 patients with urothelial and lung cancers. In bladder cancer Tyra will have results from TYRA-300’s Surf301 trial in patients with FGFR3 gene alterations; no data have been released so far from this study.

The 2024 EORTC-NCI-AACR symposium takes place in Barcelona on 23-25 October.