As OS Therapies prepares to take its bacteria-based lung cancer therapy to the FDA for approval, the biotech has been reaching out to peers in the U.S. and China to potentially spin off its “tunable” antibody-drug conjugate tech.
The company’s tunable ADC and drug conjugate platforms use pH-sensitive silicon-based linkers to connect targeting antibodies with therapeutic moieties. The aim is use the lower pH levels in tumors as a way to ensure that therapies act selectively on these areas while avoiding damage to healthy cells.
To take this tech forward, OS Therapies has now formed a subsidiary called OS Drug Conjugates that's tasked with helping “create value” for these platforms. The biotech has already “initiated discussions with clinical-stage ADC therapeutics companies in the U.S., China and other jurisdictions” regarding pairing up those companies’ clinical-stage drugs with “certain assets” from OS Therapies' tunable drug conjugate portfolios.
The hope is that these joint ventures could then be spun off into standalone publicly listed companies, with OS Therapies offering stock dividends from these entities to its shareholders. OS Therapies itself went public last summer, joining the New York Stock Exchange via a $6 million IPO.
The biotech alluded earlier this month to an upcoming announcement for its drug conjugate platforms. At the time, OS Therapies referred to “continued market interest in combining therapeutic interventions, such as antibody and vascular targeted drugs to target specific cancer cells.”
“We believe our tunable drug conjugate platform could play an outsized role in creating combination therapies that will improve outcomes while reducing side effects,” the company said in that Feb. 4 statement.
Meanwhile, OS Therapies’ top priority has been OST-HER2, which uses a HER2-bioengineered form of the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes to trigger an immune response against cancer cells expressing HER2.
The candidate posted a phase 2 win in lung cancer earlier this year, and OS Therapies secured the full intellectual rights to the drug a month ago in advance of a push for FDA approval in osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer, in the second quarter of the year.