While in Marseille for the scientific meeting to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML), I had the pleasure to interview Hervé Brailly PhD, the CEO of Innate Pharma, a leading biotech company in the Marseille Immunopôle.
Innate Pharma (@InnatePharma) was founded in 1999 by six immunologists: Hervé Brailly, Eric Vivier, Marc Bonneville, Alessandro Moretta, Jean-Jacques Fournié and Francois Romagné.
Yesterday’s blog post on “Why Target the Innate Immune System? An interview with Eric Vivier” sets the scene for today’s post.
Innate Pharma, as the name suggests, has pioneered targeting the innate immune system. The company has leveraged the research undertaken at CIML by Professor Vivier and others in the field of innate immunity.
Innate is leading the way in immuno-oncology by targeting checkpoint receptors on natural killer (NK) cells. In 2011 Innate signed a licensing deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb for the development and potential commercialization of lirilumab.
In a recent financial report (link to Sept 8 press release) the company announced that several clinical trials would read-out in the forthcoming months.
Without disclosing any material non-public information, Dr Brailly kindly spoke with BSB and talked about his vision for Innate, what data readouts we are expecting, and the inflexion point the company is now at.
Eric Vivier, DVM PhD (@EricVivier1) is a leading French immunologist whose research has focused on understanding the innate immune system, and in particular, the role natural killer (NK) cells and innate lymphoid cells (ILC) play.
He is Director of the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) and a Professor of Immunology at Aix-Marseille University.
In addition to his academic work, he also co-founded the biotech company Innate Pharma back in 1999. Through the company, he is actively involved in the translation of basic research into new cancer immunotherapy treatments.
New clinical data is eagerly expected for one of these, a first-in-class monoclonal antibody against KIR (lirilumab). It is in phase 2 clinical trials with Innate Pharma and Bristol Myers Squibb.
At the recent scientific meeting to celebrate 40 years of CIML (#CIML40), Professor Vivier kindly spoke to BSB about his research into innate immunity and the Marseille Immunopôle, for which he is also a co-founder.
It is an immunology cluster that brings together academic/clinical research with innovative biotech companies looking to bring new drugs and diagnostics to market.
This is the second post in our mini-series from the Marseille Immunopôle and CIML40. It also sets the scene for forthcoming posts on targeting the innate immune system, something you can expect to hear a lot more about in cancer immunotherapy.
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After yesterdays post on Gems from the Poster Halls at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Philadelphia where we took a look at new developments in targeted therapies, several subscribers asked for a repeat, but with a focus on immuno-oncology.
There are a number of elements that many people are interested in, especially given the Merck and BMS clinical data at AACR, where we clearly saw that:
- Anti-PD–1 therapy with pembrolizumab is superior to anti-CTLA4 with ipilimumab in metastatic melanoma (expect nivolumab to show the same thing at ASCO)
- Combined PD–1 plus CTLA4 blockade (with nivolumab plus ipilimumab) was superior to anti-CTLA4 alone, but with higher grade 3/4 toxicities, also in advanced melanoma
Sadly though, we still see that 70-80% of patients don’t respond to these therapies.
- How can we improve on that?
- What happens when we explore other factors, tumour types and different aspects of the immune system?
- What can we learn about novel sequencing or combination approaches?
- Which ones look interesting?
Endless questions can be asked – to which we still have too few answers – although there were some encouraging signs and hints of possibilities at AACR.
The Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) annual meeting promises to be a most interesting one, if the first day is anything to go by. It’s being held this week at National Harbor, Maryland on the banks of the Potomac River just south of Washington DC.
As the meeting started with some intensive workshops yesterday, the American Society for Hematology (ASH) annual meeting abstracts were released at 9am, giving up a choice between writing up SITC in situ or switching gears and analysing the initial hematology abstracts. In the interests of sanity, we have decided to focus on SITC for the next week, then move onto the AACR-NCI-EORTC conference, before reviewing the ASH data in detailed previews.
SITC is mostly a translational science meeting with a little bit of relevant clinical data through in here and there. It’s also not for the faint hearted, especially given the sheer intensity and pace of some of the talks – keeping up with pen and paper to hastily scribble notes is surprisingly quite hard!
It was an honour to attend as one of the few members of the media here. The excitement is palpable, with speakers reminding us of how only a few years ago, few people attended immunotherapy sessions at ASCO. SITC is rapidly becoming a major meeting with a record-breaking 1500 expected for the first time! It is the immuno-oncology meeting to attend for those interested in understanding the emerging trends, landscape and direction that research is taking us.
Yesterday SITC fielded two workshops with impressive line-ups from the immuno-oncology space that included Drs Carl June, James Allison, Tom Gajewski, Susan Topalian, Stephen Hodi and Mario Sznol, to name a few. The workshops focused on different topics:
- A basic one on understanding the immune system
- A more advanced one on combination strategies in immunotherapy
Rather than summarise all the talks from both sessions that ran a full day each, we’ve decided to focus on some themes, ideas and concepts that catch our attention each day. Here’s the first of our daily reviews from the SITC 2014 annual meeting. Thanks to all our subscribers whose support enabled us to attend this meeting for the first time.