Mestag Therapeutics secures funding to aid cancer fight

The company has secured £1.5m of the total UK allocation. Harnessing new insights into fibroblast-immune interactions, Mestag is using the award to accelerate the development of its MST-0300 antibody.

MST-0300 is a first-in-class bispecific antibody designed to induce TLS in solid tumours in a highly specific and localised fashion. The presence of TLS in tumours has recently emerged as being strongly correlated with improved outcomes for cancer patients across multiple tumour types.

TLS are believed to enable improved immune cell access to the tumour and drive local immune cell education, leading to a powerful orchestrated anti-tumour response.

Mestag data in hard-to-treat cancer models, recently presented at the 2024 American Association of Cancer Research conference, demonstrate potent anti-tumour effects.

Mestag CEO Susan Hill said: “We are honoured to have been selected as a recipient for this highly competitive translational award. The presence of TLS in tumours is emerging as a key driver of improved treatment outcomes in cancer patients and our MST-0300 program, designed to induce the formation of TLS in tumours, holds important therapeutic promise.

“Leveraging the dynamic UK biotech ecosystem, the Innovate UK funding will enable us to advance MST-0300 rapidly to solid tumour patients who urgently need new treatment options.”

Mestag is progressing a pipeline of sophisticated first-in-class antibodies designed to direct and drive the immune system using known and emerging fibroblast-immune biology for a distinctly differentiated class of therapeutics.

Its pipeline includes MST-0300; the M402 program, targeting a stromal checkpoint to dampen down the activation of specific immune cell subsets in inflammatory disease; and earlier programs in discovery stage.

Separately, in a collaboration with Janssen Biotech, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company, the company is also identifying novel targets for future therapies.

Its founding investigators comprise global experts in inflammatory disease, cancer, computational biology and fibroblast biology from the University of Oxford, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Mestag is supported by leading life science investors SV Health Investors, Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc., Forbion, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Northpond Ventures.