Benzinga | Nov 2, 2021 10:50AM EDT

Bicycle Therapeutics Announces Publication Of Article Highlighting Preclinical Data From BT7480 Program In Journal For ImmunoTherapy Of Cancer

Bicycle Therapeutics plc (NASDAQ:BCYC), a biotechnology company pioneering a new and differentiated class of therapeutics based on its proprietary bicyclic peptide (Bicycle(r)) technology, today announced that an article highlighting preclinical data from BT7480, a tumor-targeted immune cell agonist (TICA) targeting Nectin-4 and agonizing CD137 (4-1BB), was published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer (JITC). The article, titled "BT7480, a novel fully synthetic Bicycle tumor-targeted immune cell agonist(tm) (Bicycle TICA(tm)) induces tumor localized CD137 agonism" is available online via this link.

"CD137 is an important co-stimulatory receptor expressed on multiple components of the immune system. CD137 activation can drive anti-tumor immunity but activation outside of the tumor may give rise to toxicity. To that end, we have developed BT7480, a novel, first-in-class Nectin-4/CD137 Bicycle TICA(tm), that activates CD137 only in the presence of Nectin-4 expressing tumor cells," said Nicholas Keen, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Bicycle Therapeutics. "The data published today in JITC describe BT7480's ability to elicit rapid reprogramming of the tumor immune microenvironment, which leads to complete regressions and anti-tumor immunity with only intermittent drug exposure in syngeneic mouse tumor models. We believe this work supports the clinical investigation of BT7480 for the treatment of cancer, and we look forward to dosing the first patient in our Phase I/II clinical trial which we plan to commence by the end of this year."