Senior Scientist, Prof Robert Ramsay discusses the study by the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre on the effect of Invion Limited(ASX: IVX) ’s INV043 when used in combination with an immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI).
Key Highlights:
A huge congratulations to Thian Chew, the board and the overall team at Invion Limited (ASX:IVX) for reaching this milestone.
To me, the most exciting thing about cancer therapies at this time is the opportunity to use immunotherapies in combination with new drugs. I'm Professor Robert Ramsay. I've been working at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre for the last 29 years, and I'm interested in gastrointestinal cancers, of which anal cancer is one of them.
The current study that we've been involved in is to advance some lab studies that have basically been done with cell lines to evaluate their primary sensitivity to INV043. To move further into a clinical context, we need to test whether they work in an animal. And indeed, that's what we've been doing in the last, um, several months, and combining it with immunotherapy.
The opportunity to combine two agents together, a new therapy, new mechanism of action with the emerging efficacy of immunotherapies was a great opportunity and we did this in a unique model system we developed here at Peter Mac.
The important thing about the drug is it appears to have very high tolerability and toxicity to normal tissues and seems to be very modest, if at all identifiable.
So, In the case of anal cancer, there's an unmet need, the incidence is growing, and there's an opportunity to test new compounds like the one we're talking about today. In animal studies, we found some activity comparable to, but not as good as, some of the work that was done at the Hudson Institute. We thought that it was interesting to note that the immune system responses were changed in the tumours, and that led us to test the drug in combination with these immunotherapies.
Once we put them together, the whole game changed. The immunotherapy alone, we had one occasion where there was a cure for the tumours we were using. However, when we combined the two together, 80 per cent of animals showed a complete response, leading to scar-free essentially pristine tissue at the end of the treatment.
So it was quite remarkable noting it's an animal study, noting it, it's a very defined context, but still quite remarkable. The opportunities in the future are bright. There are many opportunities to do first-in-man phase one clinical trials to test safety and to get a signal. I liked the idea of looking at how combinations of Unconventional drugs, you know, these photodynamic therapies, it's been around for a while, but this is a new generation of drugs.
And the ability to work in cooperation with the immune system. I've always felt from probably the last two decades that the immune system is one of the arbiters of response to cancer treatment. And when you can combine a process that modulates the immune system with a new therapy approach and get responses in animals like we've seen.
It's a very exciting prospect.
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