Our best weapon against cancer may already live inside us — it just needs a little prodding. That’s the premise behind Normunity, which launched Tuesday with $65 million from investors to develop a suite of drugs that it dubs “immune normalizers” to help restore the natural ability of the immune system’s T cells to infiltrate and destroy tumors.
The company is headquartered in downtown Boston and conducts research in West Haven, Conn., at BioLabs, a shared lab facility at Yale West Campus. The location allows the firm to work closely with its scientific founder Dr. Lieping Chen, a pioneer of cancer immunotherapy and an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine.
Chen played a key role in the discovery of checkpoint proteins, parts of the immune system that he and others found were restricting T cells from attacking tumors. Drugs that block these proteins, called checkpoint inhibitors, can help unleash T cells on tumors.
Checkpoint inhibitors are one of the biggest breakthroughs in cancer treatment in the past decade. They’re also among the most lucrative products in the drug industry. Last year, Merck reaped $17.2 billion from sales of its drug Keytruda, and Bristol Myers Squibb earned $7.5 billion from its drug Opdivo. Yet despite those blockbuster sales, these immunotherapies are only effective in treating a fraction of cancer patients.
Advertisement
One reason for that, Chen said, is that cancer cells throw up defenses that prevent T cells from infiltrating tumors in the first place. Dr. Rachel Humphrey, the startup’s chief executive, said her firm is developing a “new way to uncloak the tumor and allow the normal immune system to do what it was meant to do.”
“A tumor that doesn’t have T cells will not respond to the therapies that are available now,” Humphrey said. Other biotech companies are developing immunotherapies that try to “stoke the fire” in tumors, she added. “Here, we’re actually striking the match.”
Humphrey said that her startup isn’t simply making more checkpoint inhibitors. Normunity is developing antibody therapies for “new targets that no one else has seen before,” she said. Those targets were discovered in Chen’s lab, and Normunity is getting a head start on making drugs against them before he publishes his research in a scientific journal.
Advertisement
Normunity’s initial financing should help it bring one or two of its initial drugs into clinical trials, Humphrey said. But she wouldn’t disclose the precise drug targets the firm is focused on, the kinds of cancer it is interested in tackling first, or when clinical trials of those initial drugs might begin.
“What’s important is that these targets all lend themselves to precision medicine,” she said, meaning that genetic tests will be important for predicting who will be included in the company’s clinical trials, and who stands to potentially benefit the most from the therapies.
Normunity has 14 full-time employees as well as scientists that it works within Chen’s lab through a sponsored research agreement with Yale. Humphrey said that as the startup grows, it plans to move from its temporary office space downtown on Beacon Street to a more permanent location in the Boston area.
Ryan Cross can be reached at ryan.cross@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @RLCscienceboss.