A team of investigators at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and collaborating institutions aimed to isolate the on-target activity of CAR T cells to target tumor cells.
Defects in antigen presentation lead to resistance to cancer immunotherapy, where type I conventional dendritic cells (cDC1s) are crucial drivers of antitumor immunity and their presence is tied to favorable responses and better outcomes. Intratumoral delivery of adenoviral vector, Ad5-PIB, encoding PU.1, IRF8 and BATF3 reprograms tumor cells into cDC1-like antigen-presenting cells and has shown synergy with immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy at exerting antitumor immunity. Asgard Therapeutics AB has developed AT-108, a lead candidate developed for durable efficacy.
Corner Therapeutics Inc. raised $54 million in a series A financing to create vaccines to protect against cancer and infectious diseases by helping the immune system engineer T cells. The company’s core interest is in advancements in immunotherapy through direct manipulation of T cells, which are the “keys to the kingdom for any cancer therapy,” Nick Seaver, Corner’s chief business officer, told BioWorld.
Asgard Therapeutics AB has raised €30 million (US$32.8 million) in a series A round to advance a novel approach to cancer immunotherapy, in which it is proposed to reprogram cancer cells into functional antigen-presenting dendritic cells in vivo, activating a host immune response against the tumor.
Asgard Therapeutics AB has raised €30 million (US$32.8 million) in a series A round to advance a novel approach to cancer immunotherapy, in which it is proposed to reprogram cancer cells into functional antigen-presenting dendritic cells in vivo, activating a host immune response against the tumor.
PDC*line Pharma SA has received €4.7 million (US$5.1 million) in public funding as part of a €12.5 million project to apply its allogeneic leukemia-derived dendritic cell line in the development of personalized vaccines for treating colorectal cancer.
Later this year, Mendus AB plans to move its allogeneic cell-based cancer vaccine, vididencel, into a phase II combination trial with oral azacitidine to evaluate the regimen’s potential as a maintenance therapy in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
Antitumor immunotherapy has notched big wins, but in a small proportion of patients. And one possible explanation for why is that approved immunotherapies are not yet planting their flag on most of the battlefields where tumors and the immune system engage in combat. At the opening AACR 2023 plenary session, Ralph DeNardo celebrated the successes of the current, mostly T-cell-based approaches, but also encouraged his colleagues to think more broadly about the antitumor immunity.
Heterogeneity, in both tumors and their microenvironment, limits the success of current cancer treatments. But it also provides opportunities. Heterogeneities “are not barriers to therapy, they are vulnerabilities to be exploited,” was how David DeNardo described his take at the 2023 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) on Sunday.
Researchers from the Second Hospital of Jilin University have developed a strategy involving immunogenic cell death (ICD) induced by photodynamic therapeutic (PDT) with the aim of enhancing the antitumor effects of an anti-PD-L1 monoclonal antibody (MAb).
