OSE Pharma, Effimune merging to create European immunotherapy company

The CEO of Euronext-listed OSE Pharma SA, Dominique Costantini, tells Pharma Intelligence Senior Editor Sten Stovall that her company's planned merger with privately owned Effimune SAS will create a European immunotherapy company with a pipeline of research products that includes a late-stage T-cell immunotherapeutic and a preclinical next-generation checkpoint inhibitor. Costantini says the new company, to be called OSE Immunotherapeutics, will be a significant player in activation and regulation immunotherapies. The merged company's leading product will be OSE Pharma's Tedopi, a potential "off-the-shelf" T-cell specific immunotherapy that entered a Phase III study, Atalante 1, in the US and Europe earlier this year in patients with poor-prognosis non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). A Phase II study conducted a number of years ago produced preliminary clinical results that were thought to be as good as, if not better than, other anticancer agents, and both FDA and the European Medicines Agency gave a favorable opinion on the Phase III study protocol in June 2013.