Summary
- Replimune is developing a handful of oncolytic immunotherapies therapies targeting cancers.
- The company has nearly half a billion dollars in cash.
- Catalysts are a bit distant, and insiders do not seem to be buying their own company.
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Replimune (REPL) is a cancer-focused oncolytic immuno-gene drug developer with lead candidate RP1 in phase 2 and potentially registrational trials in combination with checkpoint inhibitors in melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers. Oncolytic immunotherapy has been described by Replimune as follows:
Oncolytic immunotherapy is a dual mechanism of action where upon injection of a lytic virus into a tumor, the virus selectively replicates within the tumor, bursting cancer cells open and exposing the cancer antigens within to the immune system to trigger necrotic cell death, a major immune danger signal. Immune policing, or antigen presenting, cells are attracted to the injection site, where they internalize the released antigens, drain to lymph nodes, and prime T cells to destroy tumors with a similar antigen complement throughout the body. In other words, the local oncolytic action of the virus injected into the tumor leads to the generation of a truly systemic anti-tumor immune response (‘immunotherapy’).
Oncolytic drugs came of age with the approval of T-Vec in 2015. Replimune is developing the next generation oncolytic immunotherapy drugs targeting various cancers. Its pipeline looks like this:
The company corporate presentations describes this as follows:
Source - Corporate Presentation
The science
Oncolyic immunotherapy (OI) has clear advantages over other cancer therapies. First, as the virus breaks open the tumor cell wall, it effectively works as a universal neoantigen vaccine, exposing oncogenes to the immune system. It is an off-the-shelf therapy that is able to expose “The entire array of neoantigens ... to the immune system in a patient-specific fashion, together with the activation of both the innate and adaptive sides of the immune system.” Second, by delivering the right viral species and transgenes into the tumor, OI takes a multimodal and synergistic approach to patients in a single therapy. Third, manufacture is inexpensive, and delivery is easy with OI therapies, making the whole therapy inexpensive compared to others. The therapy “is administered as a straightforward outpatient procedure and is generally well- tolerated, allowing patients to quickly return to their daily lives, and also allowing for the modality to be pushed early into the disease course where the impact on increasing cure rates is likely to be the most pronounced.”
