Taipei-based biotech Acepodia announced yesterday (3 September) that it has agreed to a collaboration with Pfizer Ignite, a subsidiary of Pfizer, in which Pfizer’s resources and expertise will be leveraged to advance Acepodia’s cell therapies for autoimmune disease.
Pfizer will bolster Acepodia’s research and development capabilities to support the progress of the company’s unique antibody-cell conjugation (ACC) and allogeneic γδ2 T cell platforms, accelerating in particular the development of Acepodia’s candidates, ACE1831 and ACE2016. Acepodia will retain all rights to these programmes and any related partnerships.
The ACC platform is said to produce a version of a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy without the usual side effects, such as neurotoxicity and cytokine release. The technology links antibodies to proprietary immune cells to enhance tumour binding where tumour antigen expression is low.
Prior to the agreement, Acepodia stock had seen some decline. According to Yahoo Finance, share price dropped from a high in August 2023 of TWD 43.1 ($1.34 USD) following their initial public offering to as low as $20.90 TWD ($0.65 USD) in August 2024. It has since made a slight recovery, standing at $23.45 TWD ($0.73 USD) when the market opened today. The company’s market cap is TWD 14.412bn TWD ($447.9m USD).
In June 2023, the company had raised Series D funding amounting to $259m. Both this funding and Pfizer’s collaboration are focused on advancing Acepodia’s lead candidates ACE1831 and ACE2016.
ACE1831 is being tested in an open-label Phase I trial (NCT05653271) to evaluate safety and efficacy in patients with CD20-expressing non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Preliminary results released earlier this year indicated a robust and durable effect at the lowest dose tested; one out of five patients achieved complete response while three experienced disease stabilisation, and no serious adverse events were reported.
Meanwhile, ACE2016 is set to enter Phase I trialling, having been granted Investigational New Drug (IND) clearance by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February of this year for solid tumours.
Dr. Sonny Hsiao, CEO of Acepodia, said the agreement, “will position us well to deliver our immunotherapies to patients in desperate need of new options”. Kathy Fernando, head of Pfizer Ignite, stated Pfizer will “look forward to collaborating with Acepodia to help translate their compelling scientific platform into impactful new medicines for patients with unmet need”.
