CureVac, a German-based mRNA company, has announced its acquisition of Frame Cancer Therapeutics (Frame), a private company focused on advanced genomics and bioinformatics, for €32m.
The acquisition is set to extend CureVac’s capabilities and add key competencies to further accelerate its oncology strategy for new therapies that help patients’ immune systems to fight cancer.
Frame’s platform, FramePro, identifies structural changes within the cancer genome, offering the potential to develop both off-the-shelf and personalised cancer vaccines across different cancer types.
Despite these genetic changes being highly specific to individuals, the resulting neoantigenic proteins may be shared among many patients, potentially enabling the development of more broadly applicable cancer vaccines.
Commenting on the acquisition, Franz-Werner Haas, CureVac’s chief executive officer, said: “The addition of Frame’s technology and talent to CureVac’s oncology research complements our ability to identify and validate promising neoantigens for our mRNA cancer vaccine programmes.
“The bioinformatics platform developed by Frame’s researchers has the potential to identify a broad panel of neoantigens that go beyond conventional neoantigens and could strongly increase the likelihood of developing highly effective cancer vaccines.”
The full antigenic potential of a tumour is leveraged by the additional application of Frame’s technology to develop personalised cancer vaccines. Frame’s clinical trial protocol to evaluate this approach based on a peptide vaccine in 15 patients with non-small cell lung cancer was approved by regulators in the Netherlands in December 2021.
Ronald Plasterk, founder and CEO of Frame Cancer Therapeutics, said: “We [have a] content-driven approach in antigen discovery and validation and CureVac [has] extensive experience with mRNA vaccine development.
“The resulting vaccines could greatly enhance our ability to activate the human immune system against cancer, both in a personalised and off-the-shelf manner.”
Image used with permission. Copyright held by CureVac AG.