Effimune will use In Cell Art’s Nanotaxi® technology to develop cancer immunotherapies based on producing antibodies from a patient’s body, the companies annouced today. The value of the collaboration was not disclosed.

The companies will compare the efficacy of that approach to traditional production of antibodies through a bioreactor during the 12-month collaboration. The work will include an effort to demonstrate preclinical proof-of-concept, as well as the launch of future clinical studies.

Those studies will assess the companies’ cancer immunotherapy strategy, which combines a novel therapeutic target and a transfer approach based on the synthetic intracellular delivery of messenger RNA (mRNA) encoding validated monoclonal antibodies.

Effimune and In Cell Art said they will use Nanotaxi to produce antibodies involved in controlling the immune reaction against tumor cells, and apply the technology toward producing In Cell Art’s Nanotaxi-formulated DNA vaccine HepaVac for hepatocellular carcinoma.

Effimune and In Cell Art reason that enabling patients to produce their own therapeutic antibodies offers two advantages over conventional methods: a significantly reduced risk of intolerance and reduced costs from achieving economy of scale in terms of processes, number of injections, and production expense.

“The interest for Effimune is to diversify our products and to have eventually new antibodies products to inject,” Effimune CEO Bernard Vanhove said in a statement.

Effimune and In Cell Art are startups both based in Nantes, France. Each is supported by grants from the “Pays de la Loire Territoires d’Innovation” Future Investment Program (FTI-PIA), funded equally by the French government and the “Pays de la Loire” region and managed by French public investment bank Bpifrance. “Pays de la Loire” is among  four French regions to fund R&D by small and medium-sized enterprises. Effimune is a spinout of the Nantes Institute of Transplantation Urology Nephrology, launched in 2007.

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