Peptron said Friday that the company will present its research on Internalization-Enhancing Peptide (IEP), a next-generation peptide platform technology that can maximize the efficacy of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting in Chicago from April 25.
“The IEP technology, which has been independently developed over the past eight years, is a micro-exon peptide (MEP) based cell internalization-enhancing peptide that has been attracting attention as an innovative platform to overcome the limitations of existing ADC therapeutics,” Peptron said.
Peptron secured an Australian patent for a long-acting semaglutide injection for diabetes and obesity treatment. (Credit: Korea Biomedical Review)
Peptron secured an Australian patent for a long-acting semaglutide injection for diabetes and obesity treatment. (Credit: Korea Biomedical Review)
ADCs are precision therapeutics that combine antibodies and anticancer drugs to target specific cancer cells. They have provided a new paradigm for cancer treatment. However, the efficacy of ADCs is limited by poor internalization, which is the drug's inability to enter the cell due to low expression of the target substance and high heterogeneity of the target.
To overcome this problem, Peptron has incorporated IEP into its ADCs to increase accessibility to cancer tissues and effectively enhance drug entry into cells. This enables cancer cells with low expression of the target that the antibody acts on to produce as much anticancer effect as cancer cells with high target expression.
According to Peptron, compared to conventional ADCs, the IEP-enabled ADCs showed a more than 10-fold decrease in EC₅₀ values (the concentration required for a drug to exhibit half of its maximum effect) and a wider therapeutic window, resulting in a significant increase in cancer cell killing effect.
In addition, IEPs are designed to bind non-covalently rather than covalently to antibodies or ADCs. This makes them a universal platform that can be applied without changing the structure of existing ADCs, allowing simple mixing with currently marketed ADC therapeutics to significantly increase their anticancer effectiveness.
The study's results will be presented as a poster at the AACR meeting. Peptron has also completed a domestic patent application for the IEP technology and is pursuing global IP protection.
“The IEP platform technology will not only provide effective treatment opportunities for cancer patients who have been difficult to treat due to low target expression rates but also open up new possibilities for cancer treatment by improving the efficacy of existing ADC therapeutics simply,” Peptron said. “Through this AACR presentation, we plan to expand cooperation with the global pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries and actively pursue the commercialization of this technology.”
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Kim Kyoung-Won kkw97@docdocdoc.co.kr
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