Sorrento receives funding to advance immunotherapy targeting WISP1 for treatment of IPF

Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: SRNE; Sorrento), a late-stage clinical oncology company developing new treatments for cancer and its associated pain, today announced that it has received funding to advance an immunotherapy targeting WNT1-Inducible Signaling Protein-1 (WISP1) for the potential treatment of IPF, which affects more than 100,000 Americans. As this disease progresses, scarring in the lungs increases and patients gradually lose the ability to breathe, leading ultimately to death in two to five years after diagnosis.

WISP1 (also known as CCN4) is an autocrine and paracrine extracellular stimulus involved in several detrimental profibrotic processes. Preclinical studies have shown that WISP1: 1) is induced in human lung cells by key profibrotic growth factors, such as TGF-B, 2) is upregulated at the alveolar epithelial surface in IPF; 3) causes protein induced hyperplasia and proliferation of alveolar epithelial cells accompanied by increased expression of matrix metalloproteinases and fibroblast-like phenotypic changes; 4) protein stimulates fibroblasts to deposit extracellular matrix in vitro: and 5) when depleted with neutralizing murine antibodies attenuates bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis in vivo.

Sorrento was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which will support the development of the fully human anti-WISP1 antibodies discovered by Sorrento. The principal investigator on the SBIR grant is Sorrento's Senior Director of R&D Dr. Gunnar F. Kaufmann. He will work closely with Dr. Melanie Konigshoff at Comprehensive Pneumology Center (CPC) in Munich Germany, a widely recognized expert on developmental signaling pathways in chronic lung disease, including IPF.

"New anti-fibrotic drugs are desperately needed to treat IPF, which is a progressive, chronically debilitating clinical syndrome with unknown etiology and a terminal outcome. Therefore, we are grateful to NHBLI and NIH for their support of our anti-WISP1 antibody program," said Henry Ji, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Sorrento. "In addition, we are very excited to have received our third NIH grant this year supporting our innovative immunotherapies based on Sorrento's G-MAB antibody library, which will allow Sorrento to advance several antibody programs targeting unmet medical needs outside of oncology."