Periodic Reporting for period 4 - PeptiCrad (Personalized oncolytic vaccines for cancer immunotherapy)
Période du rapport: 2021-01-01 au 2022-06-30
In general, it is very well known that humans get viral infections, however our immune system is able to recognize the viruses and eliminate them quite efficiently. On the other hands, our immune system fails to recognize tumors allowing it to grow indiscriminately. This simple observation led me to hypothesize that if I could "dress" the viruses as tumors, the immune system would not fail to recognize it. On the contrary, the immune system would trigger an immune response towards the virus and everything that is covering it, including the tumor. With this easy trick I would be able to confuse the immune system making it think that “tumors are viruses to be eliminated”.
In practice, my project takes advantage of viruses that are already widely used in clinic (in clinical trials or as approved drugs) and for which we know efficacy and safety profile and decorate these viruses with tumor-specific antigens. When these viruses are given to the patient, the immune system of the patient recognize them and start an immune response against it BUT, because the virus is now coated with tumor antigens (or neo-antigens) the immune response will be rather direct against the tumor and not the virus. I have called this technology PeptiCRAd (Peptide coated Conditionally Replicating Adenoviruses) and the main aim of this grant application is to develop this technology and to test its efficacy in murine model of solid tumors.
During the implementation of the project, my research team and myself have managed to achieve all the main goals proposed in our application. We developed and proved that PeptiCRAd is an efficient platforms to treat different types of cancer in different murine models, we developed a technology for the identification and the prioritisation of tumor-specifc antigens and Neo-antigens and we combine these different technologies in a single pipeline for personalized cancer immunotherapy. The technologies that we have developed during this grant resulted in several tens of publication in prestigious journals, more than 98% of these in open access to allow everybody to read our results and replicate our technologies. In addition to our scientific production we have paid particular attention to the impact that our science would have and we have tried to maximise the impact to benefit the societal and economic growth of our stakeholder. In fact, we submitted more than 30 invention disclosures of which 7 become patents and 5 were fully licensed. Out of our core technology, PeptiCRAd, we founded a spinoff company that is now in clinical trial and that has been mentioned as one of the 15 biotech companies that is driving innovation in Finland.
All these results have resulted in more than 30 original scientific papers, 7 patents, 5 licensed technologies, 2 ERC-PoC, 1 spinoff company and an ongoing clinical trial.
In summary, I have proposed to explore the efficacy of a new technology for therapeutic cancer vaccines based on oncolytic adenoviruses decorated with tumor-specific antigens. In my laboratory we have tested and characterized the feasibility and the efficacy of this technology in various murine tumor models. Moreover, we have patented this technology and this patent has led to a spin-off company that would bring it to clinic for the benefit of real cancer patients.