Aduro Biotech, Inc. announced an exclusive license agreement with Stanford University for neoantigen identification technology developed by Dr. Hanlee Ji, associate professor of medicine at Stanford.  Aduro will leverage its proprietary live, attenuated double-deleted Listeria (LADD) immunotherapy platform to engineer personalized LADD-based cancer therapies (pLADD) encoding multiple neoantigens identified through this technology.  The company plans to initially evaluate pLADD for the treatment of cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, including colorectal cancer, with a Phase 1 clinical trial expected to be initiated in 2017. Pursuant to the terms of the agreement, Aduro received an exclusive license to the proprietary bioinformatics algorithms and computational workflows for neoantigen identification and selection. The accurate identification of neoantigens, tumor markers that are unique to an individual’s tumor, is believed to be critical in the development of a patient-specific cancer treatment.  Aduro’s LADD technology, which has been shown in clinical studies to remodel the tumor microenvironment, will be used to create a patient-specific immunotherapy that is engineered to enable the presentation of multiple selected neoantigens in dendritic cells, with the aim of inducing a targeted, robust anti-cancer immune response.