Werewolf Therapeutics Inc. $HOWL shares rose 26% Thursday after the company signed a licensing agreement with Jazz Pharmaceuticals PLC $JAZZ worth up to $1.2 billion. The companies said they entered an exclusive global license and collaboration agreement to develop WTX-613, a preclinical immuno-oncology candidate. Werewolf said WTX-613 exhibited robust anti-tumor activity in preclinical studies.
$HOWL will receive a $15 million upfront payment, with the potential to receive up to $1.26 billion in various payments as well as royalties on future net sales, the companies said. At 11:44 a.m. ET, Werewolf’s shares were up 26% at $5.96. Volume at the time topped 9.4 million shares, above the stock’s 65-day average volume of 70,466.
$JAZZ said it expects to submit an investigational new drug application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for WTX-613 next year.
AVCO offers Life Saving Medical Advances; AI & Immunotherapy for Cancer & Immune Related Diseases Including COVID-19: Avalon GloboCare Corp. (NASDAQ: AVCO)
- Clinical-Stage CellTech Developer Dedicated to Immune Effector Cell Therapy and Exosome Technology.
- Introducing Life Saving COVID-19 Diagnostics and Therapeutics.
- New Treatment for Deadly Cytokine Storm in COVID-19 Patients.
- Novel Technology to Efficiently Synthesize & Study Previously Difficult to Work With Drug Targets.
- Technology Will Facilitate Drug Design for Cancer & Immune Diseases.
- Study Published in September 2021 Issue of Journal Membranes.
- Leveraging Avalon’s existing Flash-CARTM technology platform to develop next-generation mRNA-based CAR-NK cellular therapeutics
- Clinical development of CAR-NK cell therapy planned in collaboration with the Company’s clinical partner, Lu Daopei Hospital, as a potential treatment for hematologic malignancies and other unmet medical areas
- Appoints Dongfang Liu, Ph.D., a world-class scientist and expert in CAR-NK technology, to Avalon’s Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board
- Advanced Filtration Tech Could Help Stop Life-Threatening Cytokine Storm in COVID-19 Patients
Cytokine storm has made frequent appearances in the news lately as a life-threatening complication in patients suffering from COVID-19. The condition is an inflammatory syndrome triggered by hyperactivation of immune cells that can significantly impact the patient’s chances of making a full recovery or surviving the infection at all.
Fortunately, AVCO has already been developing a range of therapies that have the potential to help target cytokine storm and other risk factors that make the widespread virus so difficult to get under control.
What Is Cytokine Storm?
The immune system uses cytokines to perform a variety of important tasks from clotting blood to triggering antibody production. When overworked — as can happen when the body is fighting off an aggressive, difficult disease like COVID-19 or is being treated with therapies designed to activate an immune response — that same immune system can end up producing too many cytokines. When the ones that trigger an inflammatory response are produced in excess, the cytokines trigger severe inflammatory symptoms, damage healthy tissue, and can even cause multiple organs to fail, leading to death.
- AVCO AVA-Trap™ Already Targets Cytokine Storm
Because cytokine storm is a common risk factor in many cancer therapies, the oncology-focused AVCO was already hard at work on a way to calm down cytokine storms. The AVCO AVA-Trap™ therapeutic program was developed to target this potentially fatal complication. By using cytokine receptor proteins, the AVA-Trap™ program could dampen the release of cytokine, essentially filtering out the excess cytokines.
When COVID-19 started to spread through populations around the globe in 2020, doctors soon realized that the virus could induce a cytokine storm and that, when it did, the chances of that patient surviving grew slim. AVCO moved quickly to file and expanded patent for the proprietary filtration technology so it could be used to help COVID patients increase their chances of recovering from the disease.
- AVCO Launches Full-Scale Plan to Tackle COVID-19 Pandemic
In addition to leveraging its existing AVA-Trap™ program to help combat cytokine storm and improve patient outcomes, AVCO also began working on a slate of other tools doctors can use to keep the evolving virus at bay.
In partnership with Adial Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: ADIL), AVCO is distributing a rapid diagnostics test that can detect multiple COVID antibodies with between 92.9% and 98.6% accuracy in just 10 minutes. Using the AVCO existing global distribution network, the 2 companies are able to make this rapid and highly accurate test available to healthcare providers worldwide.
In another partnership with Austria’s University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), AVCO is working on an intranasal spray vaccine for COVID-19. Based on innovative S-layer technology that creates uniform, repetitive protein structures, the vaccine could become a highly effective formula in a format that people could self-administer — reducing the burden on healthcare providers to individually vaccinate the world’s population and reducing barriers to access for people with mobility challenges or who live too far from the nearest vaccine administration site.
Finally, AVCO began practical testing for its allogeneic MSC-based cellular therapy (ACETEX™), which could treat the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and multisystem inflammatory syndrome that can also come with severe cases of COVID-19 infection and, like cytokine storm, significantly increase the risk of mortality. ARDS alone has been the cause of death in 70% of fatal COVID-19 cases where an aggressive inflammatory response happens.
ACETEX™ uses mesenchymal stromal cells taken from bone marrow, fat tissue, or other tissue types and adapts them to help moderate the body’s immune system response. Because cytokine storm, ARDS, and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in COVID-19 patients are all triggered by a hyperactive immune response, the potential ACETEX™ has for better regulating the immune response could offer a reliable treatment option to stop these complications in their tracks and prevent them from progressing to a fatal stage.
- AVCO and University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Co-develop Innovative In-Silico Technology, Enabling the Design and Synthesis of Novel Cell Membrane Receptor Targets for Cancer and Immune-Related Diseases
On October 7th AVCO announced co-development of a novel, cell-free, in-silico system to facilitate the Company’s drug development efforts, together with the Institute for Synthetic Bioarchitectures at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, Austria. A study of the new technology was featured in the September 2021 issue of Membranes, an international, peer-reviewed journal.
The new AVCO technology reveals that difficult-to-study cell membrane proteins can be efficiently expressed in a cell-free system, allowing for their evaluation as potentially druggable targets. The technology expands Avalon’s ability to design and produce novel membrane proteins—including receptors found on the surface of immune cells and cancer cells that are important for cell signaling and diseases such as cancer—providing Avalon an efficient tool to screen and optimize potential therapeutic targets.
Proteins function within cells and are also present on cell surfaces, embedded within the cell’s outer membrane. These membrane proteins include cell surface receptors that function in cell signaling and regulation of communication with other cells and tissues. These molecules are important drug targets and include receptors on immune cells such as T-cells for the development of cellular immunotherapies.
The researchers used computer-based models, developed at the University of Vienna, to identify factors that optimize the expression of membrane proteins in a cell-free, in-silico system, resulting in high protein yield. The AVCO study demonstrated the success of this method by showing the ability to manipulate and express a drug target membrane protein, a human voltage-dependent anion channel, at high yield.
The use of this novel AVCO technology can improve knowledge about receptors and other membrane proteins to better understand the biology of drug targets and to develop novel therapies, including immunotherapies for cancer.
The new technology is a direct result of a collaboration between AVCO and researchers at BOKU, Vienna, the University of Vienna, the Science for Life Laboratory within the Division of Nanobiotechnology at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and the Department of Biochemistry at the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
For more information on Avalon GloboCare Corp. (NASDAQ: AVCO) visit: http://www.avalon-globocare.com
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