Anocca raises €38.4m to advance TCR-T leads vs. pancreatic cancer

The SEK440m (€38.36m) financing was led by Mellby Gård with strong support from AMF, Ramsbury and four other investors. Annoca AB’s programmes to be tested within the VIDAR-1 study are the first non-viral  TCR-T cell therapies in Europe targeting a mutant KRAS oncogene in patients with terminal pancreatic cancer by gene editing.  The company has opened recruitment for the multi-centre Phase I trial of VIDAR-1, which is being conducted at leading university hospitals across Sweden, Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands.

VIDAR-1 is designed as a multi-product umbrella trial targeting oncogenic driver mutations in KRAS within pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). It will investigate up to 20 patients per product in a set of phase I/II studies. Phase I is currently conducted at eight sites in four countries with additional countries and sites in Phase II. Patients will be eligible to enrol if they have an HLA, and KRAS mutation, matching ANOC-001, ANOC-002 and ANOC-003.

Mutant KRAS is implicated in pancreatic, lung and colorectal cancers. G12V and G12D mutations in KRAS affect around 90% of pancreatic cancer patients . In 2019, the five-year survival rate of patients with PDAC was less than 10%. Despite recent advances there are no definitive treatments for advanced patients at present.

Anocca develops libraries of T-cell receptor-engineered T cell (TCR-T) therapies. The company has built a  discovery engine that uses programmable human cells to recreate and manipulate T cell immunity that enable scaling of TCR-T cell therapy development, allowing the systematic generation of libraries of products that represent personalised treatments for the broad patient populations. Anocca claims, it currently has the broadest pipeline of TCR-T oncology cell therapy treatments.