Can T-Cell Engagers Crack Solid Tumors? The Next Frontier in Cancer Immunotherapy

So there's been the Nobel Prize in immunotherapy.

where it was mainly focused on what's called checkpoint blockade.

Looking at these breaks on the immune system and people have developed antibodies that are unleashing those breaks and then immune system to recognize cancer.

That works in about 20 to 30% of patients.

And the great thing about immunotherapy compared to something like chemotherapy is that with chemotherapy, you're only seeing these tumors shrink as long as you're being treated with chemotherapy.

As soon as you stop the treatment, Whether it's chemo, ultimately, once you stop treatment, the tumors will grow back out.

With immunotherapy, the hope in it and what we've seen in some patients is that you can have this tumor shrinkage if your tumor can be completely shrunk.

you know, go completely away, 100% response, then it's possible to have this, you know, immune effect where your immune system is now able to recognize that type of cancer, recognize those types of cancer cells.

And you can have called the tail of the curve where patients are in this 20 to 30% of patients having durable benefit beyond stopping treatment.

And so that's really this holy grail of cancer medicine is you can treat to the point that a patient has a response and then their immune system can keep the cancer in check and you fit.

On the flip side of this kind of off medicine are these T-cell therapies where you're taking out cells out of their blood in a very complex processing where you have to do some preconditioning, you have to then harvest the cells, you then have to do additional types of chemotherapies in between, and then you infuse these immune cells.

But these are great, you know, types of medicines for blood cancers.

You see, you know, very high response rates, 80 to 100% of patients are medicines, again, mainly in the hematologic base.

In solid tumors, we haven't really seen much of these types of medicines.

And so that's where T-cells engagers have come into play, where it's kind of in between this checkpoint blockade and this where you only see this 20 to 30% of people responding to checkpoint blockade, by having this artificial recognition, you know, engaging with your immune cells and engaging with cancer cells, you're able to create this artificial recognition of your immune cells against cancer.

You're able to engage this remaining population.

And that's what we're focused on.

creating these molecules that can help patients that are not other types of medicines.

And the other, you know, part that people have been exploring is combining things, you know, putting multiple medicines together to then have even greater benefit.

And really, you know, at the end of the day, really focused on extending patients' lives, you know, giving them additional timely medications And, you know, I was on the front lines, Johns Hopkins.

And so I've experienced, you know, every patient that I enrolled in a clinical trial at that time has since passed away.

And so, you know, me in terms of making new medicines, because I've seen families are going through.

And, you know, I felt very hopeless when I was on that side of things, because you can only prescribe or treat patients with what's available.

And so that's really why I wanted to learn how to make new medicines, and then now make medicines to give more things in the arsenal receive.