Jumping aboard the Claudin18.2 bandwagon

When earlier this month the Chinese company Dragon Boat Pharmaceutical received the green light to begin human trials of an anti-Claudin18.2 antibody it joined numerous others pursuing this pharmacological approach. A month ago Carsgen enrolled the first patient into its potentially registrational phase 2 gastric cancer study of CT041, an anti-Claudin18.2 Car-T project, while Innovent dosed the first human subject with IBI389, a Claudin18.2-targeting T-cell engager. Shortly afterwards this nascent though burgeoning field was endorsed by Astrazeneca, which handed across $25m up front for rights to Harbour Biomed’s HBM7022, another T-cell engager MAb. The only other big pharma group with a presence in Claudin18.2 is Amgen; its MAb AMG 910 still has an active clinicaltrials.gov listing, but it no longer appears in the group’s R&D pipeline. Claudin18.2 is thought to be overexpressed on some cancers, in particular gastric and pancreatic, and it is noteworthy that many, but not all, clinical trials set expression of this protein as an inclusion criterion. Evaluate Pharma identifies no fewer than 17 assets in the clinic, many owned by Asian developers, the most advanced of which is Astellas’s zolbetuximab.