Forlong Biotechnology, a clinical-stage biotech company focusing on developing transformative cytokine therapies for patients with severe unmet needs, today announced that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Shanghai Henlius Biotech, Inc., (2696.HK) (“Henlius”) to develop innovative cancer immunotherapy with an engineered cytokine.

Under the terms of the agreement, Forlong will fuse a monoclonal antibody against a specific target selected by Henlius in a site-specific manner, with an engineered cytokine. In exchange, Forlong will receive an undisclosed upfront sponsor fee and research milestone payments, and upon reaching a predetermined development milestone, further licensing fee payments.

Forlong has developed a portfolio of engineered cytokines aiming to activate specific subpopulations of the immune system. FL115 is an interleukin-15 (IL-15) superagonist to stimulate natural killer (NK) cells and memory T cells, showing favorable safety profile and preliminary clinical responses in multiple Phase I studies in China and US, and is currently being advanced to combo therapy with PD-(L)1 antibodies in Phase I for patients with advanced solid tumors and combo therapy with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) in Phase II for patients with nonmuscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). FL116 is a human anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) antibody site-specifically fused to an interleukin-18 (IL-18) variant with minimal binding affinity to the IL-18 binding protein (IL-18BP), to preferentially activate T cells expressing both PD-1 and IL-18 receptors, and is in Preclinical Development Candidate Stage. Early research programs include cytokine-fusion proteins to activate naïve T cells and others being developed with proprietary Syntokine^® Synthetic Cytokine Platform and AI-driven Intelligent Biomolecular Discovery Platform.

“Recent progress in cancer immunotherapy has shown tremendous advancement in harnessing power of engineered cytokines through fusion with target proteins to activate desired segments of the immune system with precision,“ said Dong Wei, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Forlong Biotechnology, “we are very excited by this collaboration, and will continue to further develop cytokine fusion proteins for target-specific immunostimulatory activity to significantly improve therapeutic outcome, through our internal programs such as FL115 and FL116 as well as additional partnership in the future”.

"We are pleased to collaborate with Forlong Biotech to explore new frontiers in cancer immunotherapy," said Jijun Yuan, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Henlius. "By leveraging Forlong's synthetic cytokine platform for engineered cytokines and Henlius' profound expertise in the full-cycledevelopment of biologics, we will join forces to accelerate the development of novel therapies that can bring clinical benefits to cancer patients."