'Drug Factory' Implants Target Cancer Cells
Tiny implants being developed at Rice University activate immune cells that destroy cancer.
“In this study, we demonstrated that the ‘drug factories’ allow regulatable local administration of interleukin-2 and eradication of tumor in several mouse models, which is very exciting. This provides a strong rationale for clinical testing,” said study co-author Dr. Amir Jazaeri , professor of gynecologic oncology and reproductive medicine at MD Anderson.
Transcript
00:00:02 when i first started my lab i had a family friend who developed ovarian cancer and i'm familiar with cancer and there's different types and ovarian cancer is very puzzling because it's so deadly about 70 of the patients that develop ovarian cancer will have recurrence and recurrence is almost fatal one of the challenges is people are
00:00:25 diagnosed pretty late stage which means there's already cancer all over the ip space the other challenge with it is that the nature of the cancer is it kind of creates a lot of fluid around it and puts a lot of pressure in kind of your stomach area and so getting drugs there is really difficult
00:00:46 so we started on this path of how do we actually come up with innovative ways to deliver drugs and the nature of it kind of suggested to me that you almost need like a drug factory just because of there's already a lot of volume if you administer drugs you need to add more volume so we thought you know why not think about these beads that can kind of just sit there in that fluid and
00:01:06 actually produce the drug that we want to activate the immune system this was my project pretty much on like the second day of my after joining the lab i basically said i want to turn on and turn off the immune system and we said okay let's start with trying to figure out how to turn it on we started pretty much from scratch we
00:01:26 had the ability to put cells into spheres and we had the ability to engineer some cells and then we figured out how to sort of put them together engineer the cells to make enough of whatever protein or whatever drug that we're interested in and then encapsulate and really test them we've now programmed cells these are cells that are safe and have previously
00:01:47 been used in human clinical trials they're engineered to produce our immune effector molecules interleukin-2 in this case and then we protect them a biomaterial that allows the cells to reside in that location of the interpersonal space for a predetermined and programmed amount of time because we want the therapy to be transient to activate the immune system
00:02:11 and then shut off safely and that's the purpose of the beads is to keep the cells localized and also protect them for that temporary duration of about 15 to 30 days where we anticipate is going to be required to educate the immune system whenever we give a large enough dose of the il2 or the number of spheres
00:02:34 we're able to see a reduction in um the extent of tumor burden or the amount of tumor cells that are alive and healthy inside the mice and we're also able to actually um sort of verify our hypothesis by using flow cytometry where we see that there's much greater percentages of activating or proliferating t cells which are really really key for
00:02:57 a cancer therapeutic we've started a company called avenge bio we're really excited to work with the company to help bring these discoveries to humans and the company has been making progress over the last several years we've had multiple meetings with the fda
00:03:15 and we hope to begin human clinical trials in the latter half of 2022. it's really exciting to see to have seen the project go so far whenever i first started it was kind of just an idea on the shelf and then we really were able to make it happen so we started off with just mice that didn't have cancer and then we moved to mice
00:03:34 that did have cancer then now we've even tested it in rats and non-human primates and obviously humans are the end goal and that's sort of the next step in the way so it's really exciting to be a part of the entire process