ImmunoGen is committed to maintaining our leadership position in our field and to broadening the opportunity for our technology. Thus, we apply our unique expertise to continuously expand our portfolio of linkers and cell-killing agents (CKAs).

Our scientists have done ground-breaking research on how CKAs become activated once a TAP compound has bound to and entered a cancer cell. Our research spans the gamut from the multiple routes of CKA activation inside cancer cells to how these routes impact product efficacy and tolerability.

Using this research, we’ve developed a new family of linkers that result in TAP compounds with increased activity against cancers with multi-drug resistance (MDR), expanding our potential market. They should also expand the utility of our technology into cancers that have more limited expression of the target antigen, which also expands our potential market. These new linkers include both “cleavable” (reducible) and “non-cleavable” (non-reducible) designs. Like our other linkers, they remain intact while the TAP compound is circulating in the bloodstream, yet enable the CKA (e.g., DM1, DM4) exert its full potency once inside a cancer cell.

We have submitted patents on these new linkers and have also begun to present on them at scientific conferences (recent example).