ABL Bio, a company developing bispecific antibody platforms, said its cancer immunotherapy candidate ABL103 has been selected by the government as part of the national new drug development project.

The state-funded program aims to help companies efficiently enter clinical studies for candidate substances or non-clinical development stages.

Now that ABL103 has been selected for the project, ABL Bio will receive research funds for operating non-clinical development for two years, according to the company.

ABL Bio will enter clinical trials through follow-up non-clinical research on ABL103 using primates and the production of samples for clinical trials.

The company explained that its bispecific antibody candidate for breast and ovarian cancer, targeting B7-H4 and 4-1BB proteins on the surface of cancer cells, is in the non-clinical development phase but has the potential to be developed as a first-in-class drug.

Compared to the existing immunotherapy cancer drugs that have shown relatively insignificant outcomes in carcinomas, ABL Bio believes that B7-H4 will open up therapeutic possibilities of single or combined therapies in cancer treatment.

When the company administered ABL103 to tumor-implanted “humanized mice,” the tumor was eliminated. It also confirmed a long-lasting anticancer effect of ABL103 through memory T cells as tumor cells did not grow even after treating with the same class of repeated tumor treatment.

“As our Grabody-T platform has shown efficacy and safety in multiple pipelines, including ABL503 and ABL111, we expect ABL103 to become a differentiated immunotherapy as it is based on the same technology,” an ABL official said. “Through this project, we will speed up developing ABL103 and expand our clinical pipelines.”