SBIR-STTR Award

There is an increasing appreciation that dogs with naturally occuring cancers may be a better model system for evaluating cancer therapeutics than the traditional mouse model systems. However, use of dogs for evaluating the emerging class of immunotherapeutics for oncology is limited by the availability of suitable reagents to mentor the response of the canine immune system. The majority of reagents for canine markers that are currently available are rabbit polyclonal reagents, which are not renewable and suffer from lot-to-lot variability. In this Phase I study we propose to use our proprietary yeast antibody display platform to generate rabbit monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) against 3 canine markers, CD3e, PD-L 1 and IFN-gamma to demonstrate the power of our approach to generate high affinity, highly specific rabbit mAbs. In parallel we plan to screen our existing fully-human antibody libraries to isolate a function-blocking anti-canine PD-1 Antibody that also cross-reads with human PD-1 as a prototypic canine immunotherapeutic to be used in Phase II to assess in vivo immune responses using all the reagents generated during this project A successful outcome will result in a panel of high quality, well characterized and renewable reagents for canine biomarkers that will facilitate future development of immunotherapeutics.

Dogs with naturally occurring cancers can serve as a better model system for evaluating novel cancer immuno-therapeutics than the traditional mouse model systems, and also provide a target patient group. However, use of canine cancer patients is currently limited by the availability of suitable reagents to monitor canine immune responses. The majority of commercially-available reagents for canine biomarkers are rabbit polyclonal reagents, which are not renewable and suffer from lot-lo-lot variability. Following their success in Phase I, here the company proposes to use their novel yeast rabbit antibody display platform to discover high affinity, highly specific rabbit monoclonal antibodies against an expanded panel of 26 canine biomarkers. In parallel, AvantGen plans to optimize the caninized anti-canine-PD-1 antibody isolated in Phase I as a canine immunotherapeutic, then perform a pilot study in pet dogs with lymphoma to assess its safety and efficacy as concurrent therapy with standard of care chemotherapy using the biomarker reagents generated during this project to assess in vivo immune responses to treatment. A successful outcome will result in a panel of high quality, well characterized, renewable reagents for canine biomarkers that will facilitate future development of immunotherapeutics plus provide a novel treatment for canine lymphoma.