Agreement with Augmenta Bioworks

RNS Number : 9013E

Oncimmune Holdings PLC

11 November 2020

 

11 November 2020

Oncimmune Holdings plc

("Oncimmune" or the "Company")

Agreement with Augmenta Bioworks to Discover Therapeutic Antibodies

Oncimmune Holdings plc (AIM: ONC.L), the leading global immunodiagnostics group, today announces that it has signed a new master service agreement with Augmenta Bioworks, Inc. ("Augmenta") to profile patient plasma samples and characterise therapeutic candidates discovered through Augmenta's SingleCyte^® and DeepGrid^TM discovery platforms.

Augmenta is a California-based biotech company which works with leading pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, and research institutions to discover new therapies by identifying the human immune system's protective response to diseases.

The first project to be undertaken under this agreement will utilise Oncimmune's oncology SeroTag^TM technology to identify specific therapeutic antibodies that bind to human antigens found in cancer patients. This analysis will provide insight into clinical efficacy as well as off-target and non-specific binding as an indicator, for example, for adverse events.

Furthermore, under the agreement, an option exists to substantially increase the number of samples analysed and to run these samples over Oncimmune's infectious disease panel. On 6 October 2020, we announced Oncimmune's participation in the IMmunity Profiling of pAtients with COVID-19 for Therapy and Triage ("IMPACTT") programme to develop and validate an Infectious Disease NavigAID™ panel designed to predict COVID-19 disease severity and therapeutic response.

Adam M Hill, CEO of Oncimmune said:  "We are delighted to be partnering with such a progressive and respected organisation as Augmenta on this important programme. Oncimmune's proven SeroTag proprietary biomarker discovery engine is ideally suited to this project. We are also excited about the prospect of, once again, utilising our infectious diseases panel to help support the fight against COVID-19."

Christopher J Emig, PhD, CEO of Augmenta said : "We are looking forward to uncovering novel therapeutic candidates through the combination of Oncimmune's biomarker platform and Augmenta's massively scalable single cell analysis technologies.  Additionally, the data from this project will serve to further demonstrate the superior features of our monoclonal antibodies currently in development."

For further information:

Oncimmune Holdings plc

Adam Hill, Chief Executive Officer

Matthew Hall, Chief Financial Officer

[e-mail]

Zeus Capital Limited (Nominated Adviser and Joint Broker)

Andrew Jones, Daniel Harris, Victoria Ayton

[phone]

N+1 Singer (Joint Broker)

Aubrey Powell, Harry Gooden, Iqra Amin, James Fischer

[phone]

WG Partners (Joint Broker)

David Wilson, Chris Lee

[phone]

Media enquiries:

FTI Consulting

Ben Atwell, Michael Trace, Alex Davis

[e-mail]

[phone]

About Oncimmune

Our intimate understanding of the human immune system enables us to harness its sophisticated response to disease to detect cancer earlier and to support the development of better therapies. The key to improving cancer survival is early detection and better selection for therapy. As a company, we are driven by our passion to improve cancer survival and to give people extra time.

Oncimmune is a leading immunodiagnostics developer, primarily focused on the growing fields of immuno-oncology, autoimmune disease and infectious diseases. Oncimmune has a diversified and growing revenue from its portfolio of diagnostic products to detect early-stage cancer and a contract discovery and development service-based platform, delivering actionable insights into therapies to its pharmaceutical and biotech partners.

Oncimmune's ImmunoINSIGHTS platform enables life-science organisations to optimise drug development and delivery, leading to more effective targeted as well as safer treatments for patients. Oncimmune's immunodiagnostic technology, EarlyCDT, can detect and help identify cancer on average four years earlier than standard clinical diagnosis. Our lead diagnostic test, EarlyCDT Lung, targets a vast market estimated to grow to £3.8bn by 2024. With over 200,000 tests already performed for patients worldwide and its use being supported by peer reviewed data in over 12,000 patients, we are poised to become an integral component of future lung cancer detection programmes, globally.

Oncimmune, headquartered at its laboratory facility in Nottingham, UK, has a discovery research centre in Dortmund, Germany and a partner representative office in Shanghai, China.

What is ImmunoINSIGHTS?

The ImmunoINSIGHTS service business leverages Oncimmune's technology platform and methodologies across multiple diseases, to offer life-science organisations actionable insights for therapies across the development and product lifecycle. Our core immune-profiling technology is underpinned by our library of over eight thousand immunogenic proteins, one of the largest of its kind. This helps identify trial participants and patients into clinically relevant subgroups, enabling development of targeted and more effective treatments.

What is SeroTag^TM?

Oncimmune's proprietary biomarker discovery engine, which is leveraged in our ImmunoINSIGHTS services to discover and validate novel biomarkers can help stratify patients in multiple cancer indications and with different autoimmune diseases.

This high-throughput, multiplex technology is based on one of the largest, in-house protein libraries, as well as a unique, ever-growing repository of disease data for indications including, but not limited to, autoimmune diseases and cancer. As a result, SeroTag is helping to address and monitor a number of challenges currently hindering the successful development and broader application of both cancer immunotherapies and treatments for autoimmune diseases.

The platform is being applied to discover and validate biomarkers and develop precision diagnostic tools from minimally invasive liquid biopsies. SeroTag analyses autoantibodies-some of the most stable analytes-and is used most frequently for the identification of IgG isoforms, in addition to IgM and IgA, from just a few drops of serum.

The SeroTag platform acts as the primary discovery engine that feeds into the creation of Oncimmune's NavigAID disease-specific stratification panels-precision medicine tools which are enabling patient and disease stratification and support therapeutic development.

For more information, visit  www.oncimmune.com

About Augmenta Bioworks

Augmenta Bioworks is a venture-backed biotechnology company leveraging immune profiling technologies to enable breakthroughs in medicine. Through its DeepGrid^TM and SingleCyte^® Technologies, Augmenta profiles human immunity at unprecedented scale and speed, shrinking new drug discovery timelines from years to days. The company's platform utilizes the latest software, automation, microfluidics, high throughput DNA sequencing, and scalable computational analysis to identify immune receptors and their antigen specificity. The results are therapeutics derived from natural human immunity. The company works through partnerships in antibody discovery (infectious disease), cell therapy development (oncology), and other advanced research (auto-immunity).

 

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