A novel biologic platform elicits profound T cell costimulatory activity and antitumor immunity in mice

Combination immunotherapies utilizing complementary modalities that target distinct tumor attributes or immunosuppressive mechanisms, or engage different arms of the antitumor immune response, can elicit greater therapeutic efficacy than the component monotherapies. Increasing the number of agents included in a therapeutic cocktail can further increase efficacy, however, this approach poses numerous challenges for clinical translation. Here, a novel platform to simplify combination immunotherapy by covalently linking immunotherapeutic agonists to the costimulatory receptors CD134 and CD137 into a single heterodimeric drug, "OrthomAb", is shown. This reagent not only retains costimulatory T cell activity, but also elicits unique T cell functions that are not programmed by either individual agonist, and preferentially expands effector T cells over Tregs. Finally, in an aggressive melanoma model OrthomAb elicits better therapeutic efficacy compared to the unlinked agonists. This demonstration that two drugs can be combined into one provides a framework for distilling complex combination drug cocktails into simpler delivery platforms.