If there’s something strange
In your neighborhood
Who you gonna call?
Why, Ghostbusters, of course, as Ray Parker Jr. reminds us repeatedly in that song from the original ‘80s movie.
Instead of shadowy, see-through apparitions, however, real-life ghosts take the form of actual cells that develop spookily and invisibly until one day they manifest as full-blown disease, which may or may not have spread beyond their point of origin.
The name of this disease?
Cancer.
Yes, cancer is a ghostly and ghastly disease that has haunted mankind since the beginning of time.
To expel cancer from its host or at the very least to stun it requires the use of therapies that pack more of a wallop than the proton blasters from the movie shown below.
Arguably the best weapon that we have, to date, against cancer is immunotherapy.
These are therapies that rev up the immune system to go on the attack against cancer.
And immune cells, like Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Ernie Hudson from the original Ghostbusters movie “ain’t afraid of no ghosts.”
Neither is AdAPT-001. This is an oncolytic adenovirus that uses the hyperactive replicative machinery of tumors to make thousands and thousands of copies of itself and the TGF-β trap that it expresses.
Currently, the combination of AdAPT-001 and one or more checkpoint inhibitors is under evaluation in a Phase 2 clinical trial. Preliminary results indicate that this combination is synergistic against several tumor types including sarcomas.
So, the next time that cancer strikes, and it don’t look good, who you gonna call?
Possibly, the real-life ghostbuster, AdAPT-001.