Igeneon: Staying Close to Home

Igeneon's latest in-licensing rounds out its cancer immunotherapy pipeline with another compound its founders know well. IGN 301, an epithelial cancer vaccine, is the second of Igeneon's three clinical projects to originate from Novartis. Both were discovered under the guidance of Igeneon's founders, who have a combined 50 years' experience at the Swiss giant.

igeneon AG , a Vienna-based biotech company developing active and passive immunotherapies to treat cancer, was created with Novartis AG 's Phase I epithelial cancer vaccine in mind. The therapeutic candidate—based on an antibody that provokes an immune response to Lewis Y, a sugar expressed on the surface of lung, intestinal, breast, prostate and ovarian cancers—was discovered in the lab of Hans Loibner, PhD, founder and CEO of Igeneon. Loibner had previously spent more than 20 years in various R&D positions at Sandoz, which merged with Ciba-Geigy in 1996 to create Novartis [See Deal].

Igeneon had been working for nearly two years on the vaccine, known as IGN 301, under an option agreement with Novartis. But it only finalized its license in October this...

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