Heat Biologics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing cancer immunotherapies based in Durham, N.C., and OncoSec Medical, a San Diego, Calif.-based company developing DNA-based intratumoral cancer immunotherapies, have entered into an agreement to evaluate the combination of the immunotherapy approaches developed by each company.

Heat and OncoSec will jointly evaluate the preclinical efficacy of Heat's proprietary gp-96-Ig based ImPACT immunotherapy platform using OncoSec's core technology, ImmunoPulse, an investigational stage intratumoral DNA delivery platform.

Taylor Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D., heat's vice president of R&D, said, "This collaboration with OncoSec reflects our desire to expand Heat's ImPACT platform into DNA-based immunotherapies to stimulate immunity to both shared and private tumor antigens without introducing the complexities associated with personalized therapies.”

"In this collaboration we will evaluate the efficacy of Heat's proprietary DNA constructs with OncoSec's clinical stage electroporation platform," said Robert H. Pierce, M.D., OncoSec's chief scientific officer. "Heat's ImPACT platform is a unique approach that specifically activates tumor specific cytotoxic T-cells. We expect it will be effective with OncoSec's proprietary intratumoral delivery platform that has already shown promising clinical activity in both local and distant tumors in patients with metastatic melanoma.”

Heat and OncoSec are exploring this combination as part of their ongoing strategy to expand the application of their technologies to benefit cancer patients with unmet medical needs. Heat has two clinical stage programs based on the ImPACT platform, viagenpumatucel-L (HS-110) in a phase II clinical trial in patients with non-small cell lung cancer and vesigenurtacel-L (HS-410) in a phase II clinical trial in patients with non-muscle invasive bladder cancer. OncoSec's core platform, ImmunoPulse, which is based on the intratumoral delivery of DNA IL-12, currently is in phase II clinical trials, investigating the approach for treatment of metastatic melanoma, head and neck cancer, triple negative breast cancer and cutaneous T-cell lymphoma.