Achilles Therapeutics granted patents for oncology platform
Biopharmaceutical company Achilles Therapeutics has been granted an EU and a US patent for its methods of identifying cancer patients who may respond to a certain type of cancer treatment.
The company was granted the patents for its method of identifying cancer patients that are likely to respond to a checkpoint inhibitor (CPI) by determining the total number of clonal neoantigens, or the ratio of clonal to subclonal neoantigens, in patients’ cancer cells. Clonal neoantigens are neoantigens present on all tumor cells and absent from healthy tissue.
The patents were granted based on data showing that patients with higher numbers of clonal neoantigens respond better to checkpoint inhibitor therapies. The initial findings were confirmed in later studies showing that clonal tumor mutation burden was the strongest predictor of CPI response across seven different tumor types and three different classes of CPIs in over 1,000 CPI-treated patients.
“This is another important step in building our intellectual property position around our precision T-cell therapy platform, supporting our approach of targeting clonal neoantigens that we identify with our proprietary PELEUS bioinformatics platform,” said Dr Iraj Ali, CEO of Achilles Therapeutics.
“This adds to the growing body of data underpinning our thesis that clonal neoantigens are the best targets in solid tumor therapy. Our technology allows us to prospectively determine and target all of a patient’s unique, clonal neoantigens, and expand the clonal neoantigen-reactive T cells, or cNeT, and ensure that these reactivities are present in the final medicinal product with use of our potency release assay.”
“Achilles continues to advance their development of precision T cell therapies for solid tumor cancers. These patents are illustrative of the pioneering work that Achilles and Cancer Research UK have done in the field of clonal neoantigens,” added Tony Hickson, chief business officer of Cancer Research UK.