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Carisma Therapeutics (NASDAQ:CARM) climbed ~29% premarket Friday after the cell therapy developer said it would receive $2M for discovering a cancer drug candidate as part of a collaboration with Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA).
Nominating the first development candidate under the partnership, the company said that the unnamed drug targets Glypican-3, a cancer antigen highly expressed in hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common form of liver cancer.
The Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based company added that the $2M it is entitled to receive will be a milestone payment that Moderna (MRNA) agreed to pay when the duo joined hands in 2022 to develop chimeric antigen receptor monocyte (CAR-M) cancer therapies.
“This milestone represents a significant step forward in the development of immunotherapies for solid tumors and an advance for the in vivo cell therapy field,” said Carisma’s (CARM) science chief, Michael Klichinsky.