BioNTech, OncoC4 announce promising results for potential lung cancer antibody trial

German biotech firm BioNTech and US biopharmaceutical company OncoC4 announced on Friday that they had gotten promising results in a mid-stage lung cancer trial.

"The jointly developed immunotherapy candidate was found to shrink tumors in close to 30% of participants," the two companies said in a joint statement.

They noted that interim data from the ongoing phase 1 and 2 trial showed "encouraging signs of clinical anti-tumor activity."

The phase 3 trial of BNT316/ONC-392 is planned to be start in the third quarter of this year.

"These new data highlight the potential of BNT316/ONC-392 to provide a new approach to leveraging CTLA-4 as an effective target to address advanced, hard-to-treat tumors, further broadening our oncology toolkit," said Ozlem Tureci, co-founder of BioNTech.

She said their aim was to accelerate the development of the program towards a pivotal phase 3 evaluation to provide "the optimal therapeutic strategy for each cancer patient."

"We are especially encouraged by the readouts from the PD-(L)1-resistant NSCLC. Responses were observed regardless of PD-L1 status, and among those who failed multiple lines of immunotherapy and chemotherapy, including PD-1 and CTLA-4 combination therapy," said Pan Zheng, a co-founder at OncoC4.

On March 20, BioNTech and OncoC4 announced they would collaborate to co-develop and commercialize a novel checkpoint antibody for multiple solid tumor indications.