New collaboration to advance cancer immunotherapy research

Jun 13 2013

The Cancer Research Institute (CRI), the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and Immune Design, a biotech company focused on immune-based therapies for cancer and other human diseases, today announced that they have signed a collaboration agreement to advance cancer immunotherapy research. Specifically, the partnership will focus on clinical trials to test novel combinations of immunotherapies, including two investigational drugs from Immune Design's pipeline.

Significant momentum has been building in the development of effective therapeutic strategies that seek to improve the human immune system's ability to recognize and attack cancer. Advances in immunotherapy, reflected through product approvals and promising clinical data, support the potential for this new class of treatment to significantly impact the treatment paradigm for cancer patients.

"The collaboration with Immune Design marks the third in a series of CRI and Ludwig partnerships with industry designed to facilitate the investigation of next generation combination immunotherapies," said Adam Kolom, managing director of CRI's non-profit venture fund, which makes investments to support the costs of innovative immunotherapy clinical trials. "Each of our partnerships is designed to facilitate access to one or more high-promise immune reagents so that exciting new combination treatments can be brought to patients and studied by researchers."

The Ludwig Institute and CRI will conduct studies of cancer immunotherapy combinations through their jointly coordinated CVC clinical trials network using two investigational drugs that Immune Design will provide from its product pipeline, combined with other priority agents available to CRI and the Ludwig Institute from their internal portfolios or accessed through additional industry partnerships. The Immune Design agents include a synthetic toll-like receptor 4 (TLR-4) agonist adjuvant, called GLA (glucopyranosyl lipid A), and LV305, a novel lentivector-based vaccine product candidate.

The GLA adjuvant is poised to play an important role in the development of effective next generation vaccines for cancer immunotherapy, where they will be critical for targeting weakly immunogenic tumor antigens in order to overcome various tolerance mechanisms and facilitate induction of cytotoxic T lymphocytes that can traffic to and lyse malignant cells.

The LV305 vaccine has been specifically engineered to deliver antigen-encoding nucleic acids to dendritic cells in vivo. The vector directly targets dendritic cells with an antigen and has been demonstrated to elicit unprecedented levels of antigen-specific CD8 T cell expansion after a single injection.

"Different cancer immunotherapies are designed to target distinct and potentially complementary effects on the immune system," said Jonathan Skipper, PhD, executive director of technology development at the Ludwig Institute. "Using combinations of immunotherapies enables us to attack a patient's cancer on multiple fronts, increasing the likely impact of therapy and decreasing the chances of immune escape."

"Cancer immunotherapy has made a great amount of progress recently, but for them to work effectively a strong immune response is needed," said Carlos Paya, MD, PhD, chief executive officer at Immune Design. "Our entirely novel technologies are first in class to drive an effective and robust immune response against cancer for patients whose tumor-specific immune response is either non-detectable or suboptimal. We are excited to test our technologies in combination with other immunotherapies."

SOURCE Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research