With sales of Immunocore’s melanoma medicine steadily ticking up and an expanded label likely down the line, CEO Bahija Jallal, Ph.D., is mixing caution with ambition as she adjusts to working without a longtime colleague at her side.
Immunocore picked up its first FDA approval at the beginning of 2022, earning a nod for first-in-class T-cell engager Kimmtrak (tebentafusp) in a rare type of melanoma that affects the eye’s uvea. The biopharma is now aiming for approval of the med in the much more common skin melanoma, with topline data from a phase 3 trial in previously treated patients expected later this year.
Immunocore is also hoping to break into first-line melanoma with experimental brenetafusp, which is currently enrolling for a phase 3 trial in combination with Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdivo (nivolumab). Success here could give the British biotech a bona fide melanoma franchise.
But Jallal now has to advance this ascending franchise without one of its key architects. The company’s R&D chief, David Berman, M.D., Ph.D., who spearheaded Kimmtrak’s development, recently departed to take a job as chief development officer at Moderna. Immunocore is adjusting by streamlining its R&D work under Chief Medical Officer Mohammed Dar, M.D., and Head of Regulatory Sciences Mark Moyer, both of whom have been promoted to executive vice president.
No layoffs are expected as part of the leadership restructure, Jallal told Fierce in early February.
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“At the personal level, I’m sad about not working with [Berman],” Jallal said, noting that she has hired him twice, once at AstraZeneca’s former subsidiary MedImmune and then at Immunocore. At the same time, “you have to build the foundation in the company [so] that if one person leaves, it doesn’t completely rattle the whole thing.”
Its R&D apparatus still intact, Immunocore is also intent on developing brenetafusp in ovarian and lung cancer, with phase 1/2 readouts in both indications expected in the second half of this year. With the wide world of oncology available to them, Jallal is letting biology lead the way as the biotech tiptoes beyond melanoma.
“It’s tempting sometimes to just fly, but I don’t believe in that approach,” Jallal said. “We grow very carefully. I don’t like to get ahead of ourselves.”
Brenetafusp’s target is a protein called “preferentially expressed antigen of melanoma,” or PRAME, and despite its name it is also elevated in a variety of other cancers. Ovarian and lung cancers, Jallal explained, are known to almost always highly express PRAME, which means patients can be assumed to potentially benefit from brenetafusp treatment without needing to screen for the target first. That makes them a safer bet to pursue than other cancers, where patients would need to be tested for elevated PRAME first.
“We need to bring something transformative,” Jallal said. “When we think about ovarian [cancer], checkpoint inhibitors have not worked very well.”
The biotech already knows its platform can work in areas where checkpoint inhibitors struggle, she added, because of Kimmtrak’s success in uveal melanoma, where checkpoint inhibitors “have not done very well.” Bringing that success to patients with ovarian and lung cancer “would be fantastic,” she said.
Big swing
Immunocore’s goal of transforming patient care also explains its pursuit of a cure for another disease already dominated by a Big Pharma powerhouse: HIV.
In March 2025, Immunocore announced that one of its bispecific T-cell engagers had slashed virus levels in the blood of three patients with HIV, with no serious safety concerns reported. The data marked a significant first step in the biotech’s journey to a possible HIV cure. But why is a cancer company trying to cure HIV in the first place?
“We believe this platform can tackle something that has not been tackled before,” Jallal said. “If we have the possibility with this platform to do something transformative, I almost feel we owe it to the patients. We owe it to ourselves to try.”
Immunocore’s goal with IMC-M113V is to find the virus’ hiding places and destroy them. HIV is a retrovirus, meaning it hides its genetic material inside the genome of T cells it infects and sits dormant. Antiretrovirals need to be consistently taken in order to suppress HIV’s activity, but can’t touch this hidden reservoir of the virus.
But while HIV is hiding, a small number of viral proteins slip up to the cell’s surface, Jallal said, and Immunocore’s bispecific T-cell engager is a whiz at finding them.
“It can kill the cell that has five to 10 copies” of virus protein on its surface, the CEO said. “This is the best way to go after that reservoir.”
The biotech plans to share more data from its phase 1 HIV trial in the second half of this year, according to a Jan. 9 release. And Jallal isn’t concerned that Gilead, the global leader in all things HIV, is also pursuing a cure for the virus.
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“Academics and others have tried to get to the reservoir, but nobody has really shown consistent impact,” Jallal said. “In this area, we are really unique.”
Gilead’s bispecific amtabafusp targets the virus’ envelope protein on the surface of infected cells, while Immunocore’s is designed to bind to a different protein called Gag.
Overall, Gilead is “developing several therapies that may become part of a future ‘clear and control’ regimen” for HIV, a company spokesperson told Fierce.
Despite IMC-M113V’s “consistent impact” against the viral reservoir, Immunocore doesn’t plan to bring its HIV bispecific—or a related program for hepatitis B—forward alone. The hep B program is currently sitting idle until a partner is secured, and once the biotech has achieved proof-of-concept in HIV, that program will be shopped around, too, Jallal explained.
This comes back to Jallal’s careful approach to growth, even as her company pursues a cure for a virus that has vexed humanity for decades. Right now, the company is about 80% focused on oncology, where it has already built a strong team, with 10% going to HIV and another 10% toward a preclinical autoimmune portfolio. This allocation of effort could change down the line, Jallal told Fierce, depending on what Immunocore learns during its work.
In time, the biotech could “have a pipeline that’s basically balanced and the contribution of each therapeutic area depends on the science,” Jallal said.
While oncology, autoimmune disease and infectious disease could all be read as disparate pipeline areas, Jallal thinks they’re joined by a common thread. The connective tissue linking them all is in the immune system, she explained.
“They’re intertwined,” she said. “If you think about infectious disease, you know how many are linked now to autoimmune,” using the connection between Epstein-Barr virus and lupus as an example.
For Jallal, who cut her teeth at AstraZeneca before taking the helm of Immunocore, an abundance of caution doesn’t mean a lack of ambition. Her ultimate goal is reach a pace where the biotech submits one new product for FDA approval every year, she said.
“But we’re not there” yet, Jallal added. “I think we can go towards that, but we let the biology really guide us.”
