Company: HURA
Filing Date: 2025-02-07
Form Type: S-4
Source: 0001193125-25-022803
Chunk: 407

Company: TuHURA Biosciences, Inc./NV
Filing Date: 2025-02-07
Form: S-4
Chunk 407
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 immuno-oncology company developing novel technologies designed to overcome primary and acquired resistance to cancer immunotherapies. Our lead product candidate, IFx2.0, is an innate immune agonist designed to overcome primary resistance to checkpoint inhibitors. We are preparing to initiate a single randomized placebo-controlled Phase 3 registration trial of IFx-2.0 administered as an adjunctive therapy to Keytruda (pembrolizumab) in first line treatment for patients with advanced or metastatic Merkel Cell Carcinoma who are checkpoint inhibitor naïve, utilizing the FDA’s accelerated approval pathway. In addition to our innate immune agonist candidates, we are leveraging our Delta receptor technology to develop tumor microenvironment modulators in the form of first-in-class bi-specific antibody-peptide conjugates (“APCs”) and antibody-drug conjugates (“ADCs”) targeting Myeloid Derived Suppressor Cells (“MDSCs”). Our APCs and ADCs are being developed to inhibit the immune-suppressing effects of MDSCs on the tumor microenvironment to prevent T cell exhaustion and acquired resistance to checkpoint inhibitors and cellular therapies.

IFx Innate Immune Agonist

We have developed Immune Fx, or IFx, as an innate immune agonist technology designed to “trick” the body’s immune system to attack tumor cells by making tumor cells look like bacteria and to thereby harness the natural power of innate immunity by leveraging natural mechanisms conserved throughout evolution to recognize threats from foreign pathogens like bacteria or viruses. Our innate immune agonist product candidates are delivered either via intratumoral injection (in the case of the company’s pDNA innate immune agonist) or tumor targeted via intravenous or autologous whole-cell administration (in the case of our mRNA innate immune agonist).

Our IFx-2.0 innate immune agonist, the company’s lead product candidate, is comparatively simple to administer and involves only the injection into a patient’s tumor, or lymph node, of a relatively small amount of pDNA that is designed to encode for an immunogenic gram positive bacterial protein that gets expressed on the surface of the patient’s tumor so that the surface of the tumor looks like a bacterium.

Bacteria, like all pathogens, have molecular patterns or motifs that are conserved through evolution and that are recognized by specific pattern-recognition receptors on immune cells of our innate immune system. This is an individual’s primary line of defense against pathogens that the individual is born with, and the innate immune system has no choice but to recognize the