E-therapeutics Regulatory News (ETX)

e-therapeutics plc

("e-therapeutics" or "the Company")

Immuno-Oncology Research Collaboration with iTeos Therapeutics

Oxford, UK, 5 April 2022 - e-therapeutics plc (AIM: ETX; OTCQX: ETXPF), a specialist in computational drug discovery with a focus on developing RNA interference ("RNAi") therapeutics, announces that it has entered into a research collaboration agreement with iTeos Therapeutics, Inc. ("iTeos", Nasdaq: ITOS), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering the discovery and development of a new generation of highly differentiated immuno-oncology therapeutics for patients. The collaboration will focus on the discovery of novel therapeutic approaches and targets in immuno-oncology. e-therapeutics will remain free to explore additional collaborations in the space.

Under the terms of the agreement, e-therapeutics will receive upfront and near-term cash payments material to the revenue of the Company. The Company is also eligible to receive undisclosed milestone payments through pre-clinical and clinical development, in addition to regulatory milestones per programme.

The collaboration will combine key expertise from both companies, including e-therapeutics' computational platform and iTeos' proprietary assays. iTeos is a leader in the immuno-oncology space developing next-generation therapies for patients with cancer. e-therapeutics' computational platform and in silico predictions have been experimentally validated across multiple therapeutic areas (including in immuno-oncology), demonstrating its ability to reproducibly assess millions of therapeutic hypotheses, gain insights into lesser-known mechanistic disease processes and identify therapeutic interventions with a higher probability of success than standard drug discovery processes. This translates into a more efficient drug discovery process with greater scope for novelty, as well as significant time and cost savings.

Ali Mortazavi, Chief Executive Officer of e-therapeutics, commented:

"We are extremely pleased to partner with iTeos to help identify highly differentiated immuno-oncology medicines for patients. We believe that our computational platform can discover novel therapeutic approaches for iTeos to prosecute in a hugely promising area of cancer treatment. This collaboration provides further validation of the value of our network-driven, disease agnostic computational platform, which we will continue to leverage as we build our in-house RNAi based pipeline."

The information contained within this announcement is deemed by the Company to constitute inside information as stipulated under the Market Abuse Regulations (EU) No. 596/2014 which has been incorporated into UK law by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. 

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About iTeos Therapeutics, Inc.

iTeos Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering the discovery and development of a new generation of highly differentiated immuno-oncology therapeutics for patients. iTeos Therapeutics leverages its deep understanding of tumour immunology and immunosuppressive pathways to design novel product candidates with the potential to fully restore the immune response against cancer. The Company's innovative pipeline includes two clinical-stage programs targeting novel, validated immuno-oncology pathways designed with optimized pharmacologic properties for improved clinical outcomes. The first antibody product candidate, EOS-448, is a high affinity, potent, anti-TIGIT antibody with a functional Fc domain, designed to enhance the anti-tumour response through a multifaceted immune modulatory mechanism, currently progressing in multiple indications in collaboration with GSK. The Company is also advancing inupadenant, a next-generation adenosine A2A receptor antagonist tailored to overcome cancer immunosuppression into proof-of concept trials in several indications following encouraging single-agent activity in Phase 1. iTeos Therapeutics is headquartered in Watertown, MA with a research center in Gosselies, Belgium.

About e-therapeutics plc

e-therapeutics plc is a UK-based company integrating computational power and biology to accelerate the discovery of life-transforming medicines. The Company has developed and validated a powerful, disease and modality agnostic computational approach to drug discovery, leveraging its industry-leading expertise in network biology to fully capture and interrogate human disease complexity.

The Company's multi-disciplinary team builds computational models of biological functions to transform the search for new medicines, interventions, mechanisms and genetic support. Its biology-led in silico laboratory enables rapid hypothesis generation and phenotypic screening of millions of compounds leading to 100-1000x higher hit rates in the wet lab and successful mode of action elucidation. Novel targets can also be identified, prioritised and assessed. Harnessing internal target gene discoveries, e-therapeutics is currently building an in-house pipeline of RNAi based medicines, using its proprietary GalNAc-siRNA technology.

e-therapeutics has deployed and validated its disease-agnostic computational drug discovery platform both in house and with partners, including Novo Nordisk, Galapagos NV and a US-based, top 5 pharmaceutical company.