Cancer Personalized Immunotherapy 

NexCalibur Therapeutics is a pre-clinical stage biotechnology company that focuses on developing an innovative platform to design and produce personalised therapies and preventative vaccines for solid tumor cancers.

Our personalised therapies are designed based on neoantigens, which are unique peptides from cancer cells that can trigger strong and specific immune responses against tumors while avoiding damage to healthy tissues.

Our NexNeo platform uses a unique combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and engineered antigen-presenting cells to speed up the identification and validation of neoantigens, producing a cocktail of multiple neoantigens tailored for each patient. This is achieved by our AI tool, epiTCR-KD, which can accurately predict the immunogenicity of neoantigens by considering multiple factors that affect the interaction between peptides, HLA molecules, and T cell receptors. Subsequently, the peptide candidates identified by epiTCR-KD are screened and prioritized by our fast validation assay, FastNeo, using a library of engineered antigen-presenting cells that represents the HLA diversity of 70% Asian population.

Using NexNeo platform, we produced a neoantigen therapy for mice bearing human cancer (xenograft mouse models) and demonstrated that the therapy could induce tumor shrinkage when used alone or completely eradicate tumors when combined with chemotherapy. NexNeo platform is currently on a hybrid phase I/II clinical trial focusing on metastatic colorectal cancer patients.

Our NexNeo platform can also be used to design preventive cancer vaccine for healthy individuals with high risk of developing cancer (ie. family history or early signs of malignancy). We conducted a large-scale screening for “public neoantigens” (ie. neoantigens commonly found in multiple individuals) which could be formulated into “off-the-shelf” preventive vaccines. This approach of early intervention could potentially save lives at a much lower cost, especially in high-risk individuals.