Treos Bio’s lead cancer vaccine program is slated to hit the clinic soon, and it has tapped PPD to manage the study.
The biotech’s lead program is meant for metastatic colorectal cancer “because patients face a grim prognosis today with existing treatment options and there is an urgent need to change that,” Treos’ chief operating officer Dong Wei said in a statement. Wei said the company will submit an investigational new drug application to the U.S. FDA soon. Once approved, this will become Treos’ first human clinical trial.
PPD Biotech, which provides services specifically to biotech and small to mid-sized pharma companies, will be responsible for conducting the trial in the U.S. and Europe. London-based Treos also has operations in Budapest and San Francisco.
Treos said it selected PPD because of its immuno-oncology and vaccine expertise. The CRO section has partnered with more than 750 biotechs on their projects, PPD’s CMO Rob Dow said in a statement.
Treos built an entire family of precision therapeutic cancer vaccines around its proprietary platform. It has databases where immunological information on genetics and cancer cell characteristics are stored and proprietary algorithms to analyze in silico billions of genes to predict patients’ immune responses against specific types of cancer.
Besides the colorectal candidate, Treos said it had also completed preclinical development of six other cancer vaccines for the treatment of breast cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer, glioma, melanoma and leukemia. All cancer vaccines were developed with companion diagnostics to select patients that would most likely respond to the treatments.