The IL-12 clinical pipeline: about as many modalities as molecules

Last week, AstraZeneca dropped a second IL-12 program from its pipeline just days after BMS returned rights to a fusion protein to Dragonfly. The moves leave 10 IL-12 programs in clinical trials for cancer, based on nearly as many therapeutic modalities, showcasing industry’s continued search for the best way to harness IL-12’s immune-stimulating activity.

The decision of AstraZeneca plc (LSE:AZN; NASDAQ:AZN) to drop MEDI9253, an oncolytic Newcastle disease virus that expresses IL-12, followed an announcement by the company in November that it had returned rights to an mRNA program encoding IL-12 to Moderna Inc. (NASDAQ:MRNA). ...