Press Release
Stockholm, Sweden, March 19, 2024
Mendus AB ("Mendus" publ; IMMU. ST), a biopharmaceutical company focused on immunotherapies targeting tumor recurrence, announces that it will present the progress of its NK cell program at the 9th Annual Innate Killer Cell Summit, a leading conference for NK cell-based therapies.
Mendus Director of Research Satwinder Kaur Singh, PhD will be expert speaker at the 9th Annual Innate Killer Summit held March 18-20 in San Diego, CA, USA. The Innate Killer Summit is a leading global conference dedicated to advancing NK cell therapies to clinic. This year’s theme of the conference is “Improve Functionality & Streamlining Manufacture to Realise the Potential of NK Therapies.” Dr Singh will present research data demonstrating the use of Mendus’ DCOne platform to expand so-called memory NK cells, their phenotypic and functional characterization and the steps taken by Mendus to develop a manufacturing process suitable for therapeutic purposes. The presentation will be part of the CMC and Process Development Track held today, March 19.
“Following our initial discovery that the DCOne platform can be used to expand memory NK cells, we have made significant progress in the preclinical validation of the method, including tumor cell killing experiments. We have made the expansion protocol more robust and successfully performed the first in-house experiments with manufacturing systems suitable for the production of therapeutic quantities of memory NK cells,” says Alex Karlsson-Parra, Chief Scientific Officer of Mendus. “We are therefore excited to present our NK cell program at the Innate Killer Summit.”
Natural Killer (NK) cells are part of the innate immune system and form a first line of defense against infections and tumor cells. Unlike T cells, NK cells are not restricted to individual antigens and therefore may offer broader therapeutic applications. Key challenges to develop NK cell therapies are a better understanding of NK cell biology and manufacturing. Memory NK cells have superior persistence and tumor cell killing capacity and the presence of memory NK cells is associated with improved survival in blood-borne tumors. Memory NK cells therefore hold great therapeutic promise, but their therapeutic application is dependent on the development of reliable expansion methods.
Mendus has developed a novel method to expand memory NK cells derived from healthy donors based on the company’s proprietary DCOne platform, which provides for an off-the-shelf source of cells that combine cancer cell and dendritic cell biology. The presence of activating ligands on the cell surface of DCOne-derived mature dendritic cells provide a mechanistic rationale for the observed expansion of memory NK cells with well-characterized molecular signatures.
For more information, please contact:
Erik Manting, CEO
E-mail: ir@mendus.com
About Mendus AB (publ)
Mendus is dedicated to changing the course of cancer treatment by addressing tumor recurrence and improving survival outcomes for cancer patients, while preserving quality of life. We are leveraging our unparalleled expertise in allogeneic dendritic cell biology to develop an advanced clinical pipeline of novel, off-the-shelf, cell-based immunotherapies which combine clinical efficacy with a benign safety profile. Based in Sweden and The Netherlands, Mendus is publicly traded on the Nasdaq Stockholm under the ticker IMMU.ST. https://www.mendus.com/
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