The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of expression. (See blog post entitled, AdAPT-001 and the Bill of Rights.)
AdAPT-001, a modified common cold adenovirus, which carries a transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β) trap, exercises this right loudly and often every time it infects tumors. The purpose or raison d’être of AdAPT-001 is to copy itself repeatedly, thousands of times, even hundreds of thousands of times, the better to infect as many cancer cells as possible wherever they are, and then to express its genes as proteins.
In the meantime, every time AdAPT-001 makes copies itself, it also makes copies of the TGF-β trap gene that it carries. Once expressed as a protein, this TGF-β trap acts like a sink (see blog post entitled Let That Sink In) for the immunosuppressive and profibrotic cytokine, TGF-β. Tumors overexpress TGF-β both to prevent an anticancer immune response and drug delivery through the formation of dense scar tissue, which the TGF-β trap from AdAPT-001 counteracts.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution may not strictly apply to a modified adenovirus like AdAPT-001 but its expression of a TGF-β trap indirectly gives voice to patients and their families that hate cancer with a passion for what it has done to them and fervently hope, like we do, to eliminate it completely with a minimum of collateral toxicity.