Nouscom has raised 120 million euros ($135 million) in an oversubscribed Series D round, the Basel based biotech announced on October 19, to take its cancer interception vaccine NOUS-209 into a global registration enabling trial. The round was co-led by M Ventures and Revelation Partners, with new investors Angelini Industries, the European Investment Bank and Neva SGR joining existing backers including 5AM Ventures and Andera Partners.
NOUS-209 is an off the shelf immunotherapy built from two viral vectors delivering 209 shared frameshift peptide neoantigens. Those neoantigens arise in tumours with mismatch repair deficiency and microsatellite instability, the molecular signature of Lynch syndrome, one of the most common hereditary cancer syndromes. Carriers face a 50 to 80 percent lifetime risk of colorectal cancer and a 40 to 60 percent risk of endometrial cancer, and the syndrome is estimated to affect nearly a million people in the United States, most of them undiagnosed. The vaccine is designed to train the immune system to recognise and attack cancerous and precancerous cells before tumours develop.
The financing came with early clinical evidence. In the company’s Phase 1b/2 trial, all evaluable Lynch syndrome carriers who received NOUS-209 were free of advanced adenomas and colorectal cancer, with one year data in 43 patients and two year data in 17. Nouscom said the trial also produced broad, potent and durable anti neoantigen T cell responses, and that annual retreatment enhanced those responses. The full long term data are scheduled for presentation at the ESMO congress in Madrid on October 23 to 27. The candidate holds FDA Fast Track designation.
The design is the contrast with the field’s best known cancer vaccine program. Merck and Moderna build personalised vaccines matched to each patient’s tumour, a model with strong Phase 3 melanoma data but complex manufacturing. Nouscom’s bet is that the shared, recurrent neoantigens in Lynch syndrome make a standardised product possible, which is what makes a prevention trial in healthy carriers commercially thinkable at all.
The caveats are the usual ones for interception. The Phase 1b/2 numbers are small, the two year cohort is 17 people, and free of advanced adenomas is not the same as prevented cancer over a lifetime. The registration enabling trial the Series D funds is where the claim gets tested at scale, and its endpoint design will decide how much of today’s signal survives.