On October 31, 2023 Compugen Ltd. (Nasdaq: CGEN) (TASE:CGEN) a clinical-stage cancer immunotherapy company and a pioneer in computational target discovery, reported that it will present new data on its lead pre-clinical asset COM503, a potential first-in-class anti-IL18BP antibody in an oral presentation at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) (Free SITC Whitepaper), taking place 3-5 November 2023, San Diego, CA (Press release, Compugen, OCT 31, 2023, View Source [SID1234636581]). Abstracts have been released by SITC (Free SITC Whitepaper) today.
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"We are very excited to be presenting new pre-clinical data on COM503, a novel approach to harness cytokine biology to treat cancer, discovered using our proprietary computational discovery platform," said Anat Cohen-Dayag., Ph.D., President, and CEO at Compugen. "Cytokines are powerful therapeutic tools; however, there is a challenge of giving them systemically at levels high enough to reach and modulate the tumor microenvironment without causing systemic side effects. This is the reason for some recent clinical failures in this space."
Eran Ophir, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer at Compugen, added, "At SITC (Free SITC Whitepaper), during both oral and poster presentations, we will present evidence supporting our approach to harness IL-18 biology to fight cancer and address the challenges that led to past failures with the systemic dosing of cytokines. We show that following antibody blockade of IL-18BP, endogenous IL-18 levels in human tumors are sufficient to provoke an anti-tumor immune response. In addition, we show that administering an anti-IL18BP antibody is expected to have a better therapeutic window than administering an engineered IL-18 cytokine. Our data suggest that our anti-IL18BP antibody approach has a leading edge in inhibiting tumor growth while avoiding peripheral toxicity associated with administration of a cytokine. We look forward to discussing the data at SITC (Free SITC Whitepaper) over the coming days and the IND filing in 2024."
Key data that will be presented at SITC (Free SITC Whitepaper) include:
Antibody inhibition of IL-18BP prevented tumor growth across multiple mouse tumor models.
Antibody induced inhibition of IL-18BP resulted in a significant increase in functional immune-cells such as the effector T-cells and induced a T cell clonal expansion in the tumor, as well as an immune memory response.
Engineered IL-18 cytokine generated peripheral inflammatory responses evident by increased serum cytokines in contrast with an anti-IL-18BP antibody approach which modulated the tumor microenvironment without affecting the periphery.
Oral presentation details:
Abstract Title: Harnessing natural IL-18 activity through IL-18BP blockade reshapes the tumor microenvironment for potent anti-tumor immune response
Abstract number: 550
Session: Cytokines in Cancer
Date: Friday, November 3, 2023
Time: 3:30 PM – 5:10 PM PDT
The data will also be presented as a poster on Saturday, November 4, 2023
The abstract is available on the publication section of Compugen’s website at www.cgen.com as well as part of the JITC supplement. The poster and presentation will be made available on the publication section of Compugen’s website at www.cgen.com following presentation.