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Candel Therapeutics, a clinical-stage developer of viral immunotherapies, announced Wednesday that it will collaborate with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) Center for Cellular Immunotherapy to study the efficacy of using viral immunotherapies to help enhance the effects of cell UPenn CAR-T. therapies in solid tumor models.
The research will evaluate Candel’s enLIGHTEN discovery platform, which will provide herpes simplex virus (HSV) vectors containing selected transgenes in combination with investigational CAR-T cell therapies at UPenn. Under the terms of the agreement, each party will retain full ownership of their respective intellectual property and will retain the right to proceed to clinical trials to further study the impact of any promising combinations developed.
“This discovery partnership with Penn is a first step in evaluating the impact of innovative viral immunotherapies in combination with CAR-T cells with the goal of modulating the tumor microenvironment in such a way that CAR-T cells can enter the solid tumor, remain functional and kill tumor cells,” said Paul Peter Tak, president and CEO of Candel Therapeutics. “Our HSV constructs, based on the enLIGHTEN discovery platform, enable fine tuning of important viral properties and, with high payload capacity, enable multimodal approaches to combat cancer.”
The UPenn team for the research will be led by Neil Sheppard, Adjunct Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, who serves as Director of the T-Cell Engineering Laboratory. The laboratory operates within the Center for Immunotherapy Cell led by Carl June, a pioneer in the field of immunotherapy whose drug tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah) was the first approved gene therapy.
Despite many advances in the development of CAR-T therapies for the treatment of hematologic tumors, there are still several challenges in applying them to solid tumors due to the fact that CAR-T cells return to the bloodstream and may have difficulty penetrating the bloodstream. solid tumor.
“The solid tumor microenvironment presents numerous challenges for effective cell therapy, including stromal barriers, poor T-cell trafficking and function, poor T-cell expansion and persistence, and an overall suppressive biologic environment,” Sheppard said. . “We are excited to work with Candel to address each of the challenges posed by the solid tumor microenvironment simultaneously, representing a new approach to immunotherapy.”
For Candela, the collaboration with UPenn aligns directly with the company’s immunotherapy philosophy of delivering a therapy to the tumor site that has a cytotoxic component while stimulating and enhancing the immune response to the tumor. The company’s flagship program is CAN-2409, an adenovirus-based replication-defective genetic construct encoding the HSV-derived thymidine kinase gene. It is currently in Phase III clinical trials in prostate cancer and is also being evaluated in brain cancer as a single agent and in combination with nivolumab (Opdivo), in non-small cell lung cancer as combination therapy with PD-1/ PD- L1 immune checkpoint inhibitors, and in advanced non-metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma.
For its HSV platform, which is being leveraged in the UPenn collaboration, the company also has an early clinical trial for CAN-3110, a novel herpes simplex viral vector, for the treatment of glioma.
Source: news.google.com