NEW YORK – Immatics this week received a $35 million equity investment from Bristol Myers Squibb. BMS purchased 2,419,818 ordinary shares at $14.46 per share in a private placement transaction. Immatics’ pipeline includes bispecific T-cell engagers and autologous adoptive cell therapies. The firm has an ongoing partnership with BMS focused on development of its lead T-cell engager candidate, IMA401, for HLA-A*02:01 and MAGEA4/8-positive tumors, along with other undisclosed ACT therapies.
Artbio and SpectronRx this week announced a global partnership to manufacture Artbio's AlphaDirect isotope isolation technology for targeted cancer radiopharmaceuticals. SpectronRx will bring its capabilities in producing actinium-225 and lead-212, in turn helping Artbio improve and validate its alpha radioligand therapy manufacturing processes ahead of regulatory reviews in the US and Europe.
Blue Earth Diagnostics said this week that the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) has included Posluma (flotufolastat F 18) in its clinical practice guidelines as a PET-imaging agent to identify prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-positive prostate cancer metastases and to help guide treatment decisions. The US Food and Drug Administration approved Posluma in May.
Regulators in China have cleared InnoCare Pharma to conduct a Phase I trial in the country of its pan-TRK inhibitor zurletrectinib in pediatric patients with advanced or metastatic solid tumors harboring NTRK fusion genes, the firm said this week. The trial will include patients from 2 to 12 years old. InnoCare has zurletrectinib trials ongoing in the US in adolescent and adult patients with solid tumors harboring NTRK fusions.
Delfi Diagnostics said this week that it has exclusively licensed a method for identifying somatic genomic alterations in cell-free DNA called GEMINI (Genome-wide mutational incidence for noninvasive detection of cancer) from Johns Hopkins University. In a recent study, Hopkins researchers and their colleagues showed that a combination of GEMINI with Delfi's fragmentomics approach worked well for identifying early-stage lung cancers.
In Brief This Week is a selection of news items that may be of interest to our readers but had not previously appeared in Precision Medicine Online.