Anaveon

Anaveon is a clinical phase biopharmaceutical company that specialises in the development of treatments for diseases with immune system dysfunction.

Anaveon is a clinical phase biopharmaceutical company that develops biologics to modulate the function of cytokines with the potential to provide substantial therapeutic benefit to cancer patients.  Its vision is to develop novel immune therapies benefiting patients suffering from a wide variety of diseases with immune pathology.

Anaveon is developing selective IL-2 Receptor agonists, which have the potential to therapeutically enhance a patient’s immune system to respond to tumours. In the body, human IL-2 stimulates a type of immune cell, called a T-cell, to multiply and become activated.  Activated T-cells are able to attack tumours and, consistent with this approach, human IL-2 is already approved as a therapeutic for the treatment of metastatic melanoma and renal cancer; however human IL-2 has severe, dose-limiting side effects due to lack of specificity and a short half-life that requires frequent infusions. Anaveon’s compound, ANV419, is designed to preferentially signal through the IL-2 beta/gamma receptor and therefore overcome known challenges of human IL-2. This novel type of therapeutic, if approved, could potentially have a wide utility in oncology, including in combination with a wide range of modalities such as cell therapies, vaccines, checkpoint inhibitors and radiotherapy.

Syncona is also supportive of the company’s pre-clinical programme of its generation asset, ANV600, which targets IL-2 to tumour fighting immune cells in the tumour microenvironment and which we believe may have the potential to demonstrate superior efficacy.