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Instil Bio Announces Poster Presentations at the 2021 Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Annual Meeting
DALLAS, Nov. 15, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Instil Bio, Inc. (“Instil”) (Nasdaq: TIL), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing tumor
About this update from Instil Bio, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"DALLAS, Nov. 15, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Instil Bio, Inc. (“Instil”) (Nasdaq: TIL), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing tumor infiltrating lymphocyte, or TIL, therapies for the treatment of patients with cancer, today announced poster presentations demonstrating pre-clinical data of the CoStimulatory Antigen Receptor (CoStAR) platform at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2021), held from November 10-14, 2021. Instil also presented a Trials-in-Progress poster detailing DELTA-1, the ongoing Phase 2 study of ITIL-168 in advanced melanoma. Pre-clinical data of the anti-FOLR1 CoStAR construct utilized in ITIL-306, Instil’s first genetically-engineered CoStAR-TIL product candidate, was shown in Poster 198. The results demonstrated that CoStAR broadly enhances effector function of T cells including cytolytic activity, cytokine secretion and proliferation of T cells. CoStAR did not stimulate T cells on its own, but only increased T-cell function in the presence of signals activating both the tumor-reactive TCR and the CoStAR molecule. Additionally, data were presented that showed CoStAR was transduced at high efficiency (greater than 40%) into primary ovarian cancer TILs and effector function of CoStAR-TIL was increased over untransduced TILs when cocultured with autologous tumor cells. The proprietary CoStAR platform utilizes intracellular CD28 and CD40 domains to deliver novel synergistic costimulatory activity to T cells. Poster 199 showcased enhanced activity of T cells engineered with dual CD28/CD40-containing CoStARs, with greater proliferation, enhanced effector function, and a superior cytokine secretion profile compared to a CD28-only CoStAR. Importantly, CoStAR-expressing T cells proliferated exponentially after exposure to tumor antigen, even in the absence of exogenous interleukin (IL)-2, a key required growth factor for T cells in vitro. “These data further support our excitement for the CoStAR platform, which addresses a major challenge for solid tumor cell therapy: the lack of effective costimulation within the tumor microenvironment,” said Mark Dudley, Ph.D., Head of Research at Instil. “The optimized intracellular signaling domains of our CoStAR platform include CD28 and CD40, which demonstrate superior performance over CoStARs containing only CD28.” “...