Immuneering Corporation announced preclinical data highlighting the potential of its lead product candidate, IMM-1-104, to inhibit tumor growth in NRAS mutant melanoma models. The data were submitted as a poster presentation at the recently postponed American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Special Conference: Targeting RAS (originally scheduled for January 7-10, 2022). Given that abstracts are not being published at this time due to postponement of the event, Immuneering is making available the data in a presentation titled “Head-to-Head Comparison of the Dual-MEK Inhibitor IMM-1-104 Versus Binimetinib in NRAS Mutant Melanoma Models,” by Peter King, PhD, Vice President and Head of Discovery at Immuneering on its website (www.immuneering.com/publications/).

IMM-1-104 is a novel, allosteric dual-MEK inhibitor that is designed to disrupt phosphorylation of both MEK and its downstream target ERK and has a short plasma drug half-life, with the aim of enabling deep cyclic inhibition with a near-zero drug trough. The Company anticipates submission of an Investigational New Drug application (IND) for IMM-1-104 to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the third quarter of this year. In this preclinical study, Immuneering modeled binimetinib versus IMM-1-104 in SK-MEL-2 in vivo.

SK-MEL-2 is a melanoma tumor cell line that displays a similar molecular profile to approximately half of the patients who participated in the Phase 3 NEMO study, displaying an NRAS-Q61R mutation. The NEMO study results showed binimetinib did not improve overall survival compared with dacarbazine (11.0 vs. 10.1 months, respectively) in NRAS mutant melanoma patients and, in fact, showed a 50% increase in serious adverse events (34% vs.

22%, respectively).