ImmunoGen Reports on Investigational B-Cell Compound

This past weekend biotechnology company Immunogen reported on data from an extended Phase I study of their investigational treatment, currently known as SAR3419, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

They said that the investigational compound, for the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and other B-cell malignancies showed "improved safety and performance under a modified dosing schedule."

The compound--SAR3419—developed by ImmunoGen and licensed to Sanofi, is one aspect of a much wider company collaboration that involves ImmunoGen's TAP technology, which works like an antibody drug conjugate and delivers a drug payload to specific cells to kill them.

Doing so makes the treatment especially lethal to the cell but not damaging to surrounding tissue, the idea being to reduce side effects and adverse events.

In the Phase I trial, patients that were administered the treatment weekly for four weeks, followed by every two weeks for another four doses showed more improvement than patients dosed weekly.

"We believe the findings reported today support that SAR3419 has the potential to become an important new therapy for key B-cell malignancies," said ImmunoGen President and Chief Executive Daniel Junius said. "These findings also add to the growing body of clinical data supporting that the utility of our TAP technology--and the depth of our product opportunities--extend well beyond any one compound to multiple types of cancers, antibodies, and product designs."

Source: MarketWatch