3T Biosciences announces second cancer immunotherapy partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim
Image credit: 3T Biosciences
3T Biosciences, a company our team supported in its early days, recently announced its second partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim to discover and develop next-generation cancer therapies. This expanded collaboration builds on their first partnership, announced in January of 2023.
Boehringer Ingelheim will pay an undisclosed upfront fee and up to $270 million in milestones for each target selected by the collaboration. The new agreement will extend the collaboration between the two companies; the total milestones including both agreements amount to $538.5 million.
Lamine Mbow, global head of cancer immunology and immune modulation at Boehringer Ingelheim, said "the initial success of our work with 3T gives us confidence that together we can and will expand and accelerate our pipeline of first-in-class T-cell based anti-cancer therapies." Stefan J. Scherer, CEO of 3T Biosciences, added that the collaboration has provided “a higher degree of validation of our 3T-TRACE discovery platform” and motivated the team to "go broader and deeper into other cancers."
T-cell therapies are a type of immunotherapy that harness the power of the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. By engineering T-cells to recognize and attack specific antigens on tumor cells, these therapies could offer a more precise and effective way to treat various types of cancer. However, finding suitable antigens that are unique to cancer cells and not present on healthy tissues is a major challenge.
This is where 3T Biosciences comes in. The startup has developed a proprietary platform called 3T-TRACE, which uses mass spectrometry and machine learning to identify novel antigens from patient-derived T-cell receptor (TCR) data. Boehringer Ingelheim has been providing TCR data from its own pipeline of first-in-class T-cell therapies to support 3T’s target discovery work.
Boehringer Ingelheim and 3T Biosciences share a vision of harnessing the power of the immune system to fight cancer. By combining their expertise, resources, and passion, they are advancing the field of immuno-oncology and bringing us closer to the ultimate goal of curing cancer.
