Description

We are a biopharmaceutical company utilizing our differentiated platform to discover and develop novel antibody-based immunotherapeutics to treat a range of solid tumor types. While more traditional oncology drug discovery approaches attempt to generate antibodies against known targets, our approach relies on the human immune system to direct us to unique antibody-target pairs from patients experiencing a clinically meaningful, active immune response against their tumors.

These unique antibody-target pairs represent a potentially novel and previously unexplored landscape of immuno-oncology targets. We believe the fact that our approach has the potential to deliver novel, previously unexplored immuno-oncology targets provides us with a significant competitive advantage over traditional approaches which focus on known targets that many companies are aware of and can pursue. We have utilized our drug discovery approach to identify over 1,400 distinct human antibodies that bind preferentially to tumor tissue from patients who are not the source of the antibody. Our lead product candidate, ATRC-101, is a monoclonal antibody with a novel mechanism of action and target derived from an antibody identified using our discovery platform. ATRC-101 reacts in vitro with a majority of human ovarian, non-small cell lung, colorectal and breast cancer samples from multiple patients. It has demonstrated robust anti-tumor activity as a single agent in multiple preclinical models, including one model in which PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors typically display limited activity. We anticipate filing an Investigational New Drug, or IND, application for ATRC-101 in late 2019 and initiating a Phase 1b clinical trial in patients with solid tumors in early 2020, subject to U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, approval of our IND application.

Our discovery process begins by gathering blood samples, mostly through company-sponsored non-interventional clinical studies, from cancer patients before, during and after they undergo treatment, which can induce an active anti-tumor immune response. Through this process, we have built a broad repository of over 1,200 samples from over 400 donors, representing over 25 different solid tumor types. We identify those patients with clinically meaningful responses to therapy, defined as those that reach validated surrogate endpoints of complete or partial response, stable disease for six months, or long-term progression-free survival.

For those patients, we then examine their samples for rare antibody-producing B cells called plasmablasts that are elevated during an active immune response. We believe that these human immune responses, which often occur over an extended period of time, generate antibodies accessible with our platform that would be difficult to obtain through shorter term, non-human immunization or in vitro strategies.