IN8bio, the company behind today’s most innovative therapeutic research toward treating aggressive brain cancers, expects to advance its lead solid tumor drug program into Phase 2 clinical trials next year. The company was launched from technology developed at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and intellectual property licensed from the Bill L. Harbert Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (HIIE) and two other institutions.
Earlier this year IN8bio announced that all newly diagnosed glioblastoma multiforme patients enrolled in a Phase 1 clinical trial at UAB exceeded both their median and expected progression-free survival with one patient that had recently reached the 1-year progression-free milestone, demonstrating durable stable disease. Glioblastoma multiforme, the most aggressive type of brain cancer, is almost always fatal. 
IN8bio, a UAB spin-off company, plans to advance brain cancer drug programs into Phase 2 clinical trials in 2023. (Photo: IN8bio)
IN8bio’s cellular therapies for solid tumor cancers are designed to drive synergies with conventional chemotherapy to eliminate more cancer cells. To do that, the company’s researchers are building on a gamma-delta T cell-based therapy developed by its Chief Scientific Officer, Lawrence Lamb, Ph.D., and collaborators, during his time at the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center and as a professor of medicine in the Department of Hematology and Oncology.
“The team at IN8bio is singularly focused on developing therapies that prolong patient lives,” said Founder and CEO William Ho.
“Our approach hijacks the tumor’s resistance mechanism to chemotherapy and genetically engineers it into gamma-delta T cells so that they can survive combined dosing with chemotherapy. This treatment approach allows clinicians to target the chemotherapy-resistant tumor cells and cancer stem cells that often remain after traditional standard-of-care treatment and almost always result in relapse,” Ho said.
While IN8bio’s business headquarters are in New York City, the company is close to completing an approximately 10,000-square-foot state-of-the-art laboratory and office space in Birmingham’s Pepper Place.
The next five years should bring rapid growth for the company.
“We expect to advance our current programs toward the goal of having an approved product on the market to help cancer patients,” Ho said.
At the HIIE’s 2022 Innovation Awards on Oct. 21, IN8bio became the first recipient of the Award for Excellence in Entrepreneurship, intended to honor growing, successful businesses or entrepreneurs that got their start at UAB.
IN8bio completed an initial public offering on the NASDAQ exchange in August 2021.