BioNTech & Medigene sign oncology partnership

Pharmaceutical company BioNTech and immune-oncology group Medigene have signed a research collaboration to develop T-cell receptor (TCT) based immunotherapies against cancer.

The companies will work together on the project over three years during which Medigene will receive €26 million alongside research funding.

As part of the project, Medigene will contribute its TCR discovery platform for the development of TCRs against multiple solid tumour targets nominated by BioNTech. Medigene’s TCR discovery platform is automated and is designed to bypass central tolerance to yield high affinity TCRs.

Engineered TCR-modified T cells (TCR-T cells) are reprogrammed to express a TCR that can recognise specific antigens only present on tumour cells. It’s thought that this can help enable a precise and potent immune response to attack a patient’s tumour.

“This collaboration with Medigene expands our cell therapy portfolio and TCR discovery capabilities, and further strengthens our ability to be a leader in the rapidly emerging field of engineered cell therapies,” said Ugur Sahin, chief executive officer and co-founder of BioNTech. “We look forward to working closely with Medigene to develop new treatments which address solid tumours with high unmet medical need.”

The agreement will see BioNTech acquire Medigene’s preclinical TCR programme, which includes a range of TCR-T cell empowering technologies, as well as Medigene’s PRAME product targeting tumour-associated antigens in oncology.

BioNTech will also obtain the exclusive option to acquire additional existing TCRs in Medigene’s discovery pipeline and will receive licenses to the company’s PD1-41BB switch receptor and precision pairing library. This has the potential to augment TCR cell therapy efficacy and can be applied to all BioNTech cell therapy programmes.

Professor Dolores Schendel, chief executive officer and chief scientific officer at Medigene added: “Medigene is at the forefront of the development of TCR-T therapies for oncology. The sale and licensing deal with BioNTech is an important validation from a global leading biotech company of our proprietary technologies to discover and characterise highly specific TCRs and empower resulting TCR-T cells to fight solid tumours. This partnership provides Medigene with meaningful financial resources to fuel our next generation development programmes targeting potentially novel tumour-specific “dark matter” antigens, further tools to enhance T-cell-based immunotherapies, as well as additional potential strategic deals with future milestone payments and royalties.”