Biotech Showcase™ 2016: Interview: Enumeral aspires to take PD-1 inhibition to the next level

Enumeral CEO Arthur Tinkelenberg explains his company’s human-driven immune profiling platform and how it could help develop tomorrow’s checkpoint inhibitors to “The Pink Sheet” Senior Writer Emily Hayes. Enumeral’s platform allows researchers to study cells directly from patients, in order to identify those who will respond to particular drugs. In late 2014, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech secured a collaboration deal with Merck that involves using this platform to interrogate the tumor microenvironment in human colon cancer tissues, for use in predicting response to the big pharma’s immunotherapies. Much research work to date has been in rodent models, but predicting how immunomodulatory therapy works using animal models doesn’t work very well, the exec explains. Tinkelenberg also discusses his company’s lead preclinical candidate, a PD-1 inhibitor for lung cancer that will be aimed at PD-1 treatment failures.