2024-06-11
Anocca: Sweden’s largest ATMP-developing SME
ATMP Sweden’s 100th member: Anocca
ATMP Sweden is proud to welcome it’s 100th member! Anocca, a Swedish company, founded in 2014, has become the 100th member of the ATMP Sweden community! With over 100 employees based at its site at the former AstraZeneca R&D facility in Södertälje, Anocca is Sweden’s largest ATMP-developing SME. Using its platform technologies and in-house manufacturing capability, the company is developing a pipeline of engineered T-cell receptor T-cell therapies (TCR-T) for the treatment of solid tumour cancers. Sweden’s advanced therapies sector is growing fast, and Anocca is a company at the forefront of that growth, supporting the global visibility of Sweden as a leading advanced therapies nation.
“We are excited to join ATMP Sweden as member number 100,” said Mark Farmery, CDO at Anocca. “ATMP Sweden has an important mission to promote collaboration across the ATMP ecosystem nationally and build Sweden’s profile on the international stage, and we are proud to support this.”
Anocca realises that science is not a solo activity, and that success comes through collaborating in networks and combining complementary technologies, expertise and capabilities. In the field of advanced therapies, ATMP Sweden’s network provides a framework to support accelerated patient access to safe and effective modern medicines and is actively contributing to making Sweden a world leading developer of advanced therapies.
“ATMP development is challenging, with complex manufacturing and many scientific, clinical and regulatory hurdles.” said Hugh Salter, CSO at Anocca. “Pre-competitive collaborative networks like ATMP Sweden, as well as government support for common initiatives and infrastructure, can really help SMEs and academic researchers, in particular, to bring new treatments forward.”
It’s a proud day for us in welcoming our 100th ATMP Sweden member! Anocca has been a strong supporter of ATMP Sweden in recent years and we see them as an important and diverse stakeholder in the Swedish ATMP ecosystem. We really appreciate the support of our members towards keeping our ATMP Sweden communication and network support functions alive. With so many organisations and individuals showing their membership support in this first 6 months, we are optimistic for our platforms to not only survive but thrive.
We look forward to hearing from other organisations with interest to join our membership. I wonder who member number 200 will be?
You can find the list of organisational members on our website:
ATMP – Member list (atmpsweden.se)
And information on how to become a member:
ATMP – Membership (atmpsweden.se)
To mark the important milestone of welcoming member number #100 here is some more information about Anocca below:
Anocca has built end-to-end capabilities that enable systematic T-cell receptor-engineered T-cell therapy (TCR-T) development at scale and aims to redefine the treatment of solid tumour cancers (Figure 1). The proprietary Anocca technology platform precisely maps T-cell targets on cancer cells and identifies highly specific and potent TCRs that recognise those targets, leading to the creation of validated TCR asset libraries that can be matched with a patient’s tumour profile and deployed in personalized TCR-T cell therapies. The Anocca pipeline comprises over 40 pre-clinical TCR assets and the company has established an in-house GMP manufacturing facility to enable the clinical development of its TCR-T cell therapy products. Anocca’s first clinical program, a multi-asset approach targeting cancers with KRAS oncogenic driver-mutations, is about to enter clinical development in a hard-to-treat solid tumour indication.
Figure 1: Schematic of Anocca’s T-cell receptor-engineered T-cell therapy (TCR-T) immunotherapy approach to treating solid tumours. See other Swedish immunotherapies here ATMP – Immunotherapies (atmpsweden.se)
Anocca is privately owned and has raised over 1.5B SEK in financing to date. It employs over one hundred talented scientists, engineers and software developers, drawn from more than 35 nations, that work from the company’s state-of-the-art research and manufacturing facilities. To strengthen its workforce and address gaps in the advanced therapies talent pool, Anocca creates entry-level laboratory employment opportunities for non-scientifically trained people from the local community through a training and mentorship program, called BioStart, that the company initiated in 2021. Anocca’s team skilfully combines molecular and genetic tools, automation technologies, an advanced software ecosystem and cutting-edge cell therapy manufacturing technologies to analyse the immune system, precisely identify high-quality and safe TCRs and develop best-in-class TCR-T cell therapies.