Preclinical toxicology and pharmacology evaluation of a new TNFR2 antagonistic monoclonal antibody for CTCL therapy
Cancer killed over 600,000 people in US in 2020. The cost for healthcare and society is unbearable: because of cancer, $180B healthcare expenditure and $134B lost productivity are recorded every year. This is happening despite recent advancements in therapy and the emergence of an ever expanding array of new therapeutics for the over 1.8M new cancer patients every year. Indeed, because of the multitude and redundancy of mechanisms contributing to cancer growth, therapies are often ineffective.
Boston Immune Technologies and Therapeutics (BITT) is developing BITT-1492, able to target both cancer cells and their microenvironment. BITT-1492 is an antagonist antibody against TNFR2 – a receptor highly expressed in cancer tissue and immune suppressive cells in the microenvironment, where it mediates pro-survival signaling. Thanks to BITT’s proprietary antibody design platform, BITT-1492 is the first and only antibody able to dominantly shut down TNFR2 signaling.