[THE INVESTOR] Korean biotech company SillaJen said Aug. 17 it had signed a contract with the National Cancer Institute, a medical research agency of the US government, for the development of a combination therapy for colorectal cancer.

Under the cooperative research and development agreement, SillaJen will collaborate with the Maryland-based agency to evaluate the combination of SillaJen’s lead clinical candidate Pexa-Vec, an oncolytic virus vaccine designed to kill cancer cells, with AstraZeneca’s two immune checkpoint inhibitors targeting PD-L1 and CTLA-4 protein receptors.

“To date, there has been no approval for checkpoint inhibitor therapy for the vast majority of patients with CRC,” said James Burke, Chief Medical Officer of SillaJen.

He added that investigation of the potential for Pexa-Vec to “prime” or sensitize colorectal cancer to check point inhibitor therapy is an exciting opportunity to further extend immunotherapy to this substantial number of patients without curative or immunotherapeutic options.

The NCI will recruit and treat patients on the jointly developed protocol and the agency will handle the management of the planned phase 1 and 2 clinical studies on 35 patients, according to SillaJen.

Pexa-Vec alone is undergoing phase 3 clinical trials in Europe while it got approval to initiate studies in China in July. The drug candidate was licensed to French biotechnology company Transgene in 2010.

Meanwhile, AstraZeneca announced in July that its phase 3 trial with the combination of durvalumab and tremelimumab, the checkpoint inhibitors to be used for the upcoming study by the NCI, have failed to achieve better results than standard chemotherapy in lung cancer.

By Park Han-na (hnpark@heraldcorp.com)