Oncorus Inc.

• Oncorus Inc.
• Health-Care

ONCR

We are a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing next-generation viral immunotherapies to transform outcomes for cancer patients. Using our two distinct proprietary platforms, we are developing a pipeline of intratumorally and intravenously administered product candidates designed to selectively attack and kill tumor cells and stimulate multiple arms of the immune system against tumors.

Our lead product candidate, ONCR-177, is an intratumorally administered viral immunotherapy based on our oncolytic HSV-1 platform, referred to as our oHSV Platform, which leverages the Herpes Simplex Virus type 1, or HSV-1, a virus which has been clinically proven to effectively treat certain cancers. Utilizing this proprietary platform, we are engineering our product candidates, such as ONCR-177, to carry greater numbers of immunostimulatory transgenes than viral immunotherapies that are either currently approved or in clinical development.

These transgenes are designed to drive strong systemic anti-tumor immunity to elicit tumor responses at injected and distant non-injected tumor sites, or abscopal activity. In addition, viruses from our oHSV Platform maintain full viral replication competency in tumors and are designed to be selectively attenuated in healthy tissues. We believe this unique combination of features allows us to break the safety versus potency trade-off that has generally limited the viral immunotherapy field to date. We are also developing a broad pipeline of product candidates that leverages our second platform, which we refer to as our Synthetic Platform. This platform aims to enable repeat intravenous administration of viral immunotherapies in order to treat cancers that are less amenable to intratumoral injection due to safety and feasibility reasons, such as cancers of the lung.

We have initiated and begun dosing patients in a Phase 1 clinical trial of ONCR-177 in patients with several different types of solid tumors, including breast cancers and cutaneous tumors. We expect to report preliminary data from this trial in multiple data readouts beginning in the second half of 2021 through the second half of 2022. We also have additional preclinical stage oHSV programs addressing both intratumoral and intravenous solutions to other unmet medical needs, including a program designed to target brain cancer through intratumoral injection, which we refer to as ONCR-GBM. We expect to nominate a clinical candidate from this program in the second half of 2021.

Viral immunotherapies cause an immunogenic cell death by way of viral oncolysis, which has the added benefit of exposing all the tumor’s neoantigens to the immune system. These therapies can also be engineered to express multiple transgenes to further stimulate robust and durable patient-specific anti-tumor immune responses. We designed ONCR-177 to overcome the limitations of existing viral immunotherapies by enhancing abscopal activity and potency. In addition to its ability to cause immunogenic cell death, ONCR-177 is armed with five immunostimulatory transgenes: IL-12, CCL4, FLT3LG, a PD-1 antagonist nanobody and a CTLA-4 antagonist monoclonal antibody (which has the same amino acid sequence as ipilimumab). In multiple preclinical models of cancer, immune cells activated by ONCR-177 and its encoded payloads drive anti-tumor responses in both injected tumors and non-injected tumors, or abscopal activity.

We also designed ONCR-177 to replicate and express transgenes only in tumor cells while disabling its effects on healthy tissues. In multiple preclinical cancer models we observed that these anti-tumor activities of ONCR-177 are achieved without either the systemic release of cytokines that can be associated with toxicity or significant presence of the virus in non-injected tumors or in the circulation, in addition to favorable tolerability when administered via intravenous and intratumoral injection in a validated murine model of HSV-1 infection. 

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