Aligos Therapeutics Inc. has disclosed programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1; PDCD1; CD279), PD-1 ligand 1 (PD-L1; CD274) and/or PD-1/PD-L1 interaction inhibitors reported to be useful for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma and hepatitis B virus (HBV).
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most frequent tumor of the liver, and in contrast to the reduction in the number of deaths in many common cancers, HCC’s mortality rates have gone up in recent years. One of the features that characterizes HCC is the activation of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling. Recent preclinical testing in HCC models has shown a reduction in tumor growth using siRNA or ASOs acting as β-catenin inhibitors.
Lion TCR Pte. Ltd. raised $40 million in series B funding that will see the company advance its clinical trial program for its hepatitis B virus (HBV)-specific T-cell receptor (TCR) cell therapy for HBV-related liver cancer.
While the liver is mostly known as the core of metabolism, contributing to the storage of nutrients and excretion of toxic substances, there is an increasing interest in how it interacts with the central nervous system through the liver-brain axis. At the 2023 European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) meeting in Vienna, Austria, group leader Kristina Schoonjans and her colleague Hadrien Demagny from the Laboratory of Metabolic Signaling at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, gave talks setting out the context of inter-organ communication in liver disease, adding new findings from their research in the liver-brain axis.
XNK Therapeutics AB has entered into a preclinical research agreement with a global pharma company to study XNK’s autologous natural killer (NK) cell therapy candidate XNK-04 in combination with a well-documented PD-L1 antibody in liver cancer.
Tumor-infiltrating myeloid cells such as tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) can suppress T-cell recruitment and function and promote the expansion and dissemination of cancer cells depending on their functional states. In hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), TAMs are associated with resistance to sorafenib, the first-line treatment for advanced HCC.
China’s NMPA gave the nod to Roche Diagnostics (Shanghai) Ltd.’s anti-preferentially expressed antigen in melanoma (PRAME) (EPR 20330) that could help to speed up melanoma diagnosis and improve survival rates.
