We are in the midst of a “boarder crisis” the likes of which has never been seen before. 😉
Sound familiar? It should or, at least, it would if not for the spelling of border as “boarder”. A boarder is a lodger. The boarder in this scenario is lead EpicentRx therapy, AdAPT-001, which takes up residence, however briefly, in cancer cells. The phrase, “room and board”, applies because when AdAPT-001, an oncolytic adenovirus that carries a transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ) trap, infects cancer cells, it massively copies itself, accumulating to such a degree that eventually no more room or space is left inside these cancer cells, and so they burst or lyse as a result.
But lysis is only part of the story, the least important part. The other, more relevant part is that the “boarder police” i.e., the immune system are alerted to the presence of the cancer cells because of AdAPT-001, and so they go on the attack against tumors, hopefully seeking out and annihilating them at the source.
But there’s more: when AdAPT-001 is combined with another class of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors, even when those same checkpoint inhibitors have been previously tried and failed, the immune system revs up to such a degree that complete responses and durable remissions are made possible as we have seen in clinical trials.
To very liberally paraphrase Emma Lazarus’ famous 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of cancer cells yearning to breathe free, and it is our hope and belief that AdAPT-001 with or without a checkpoint inhibitor will wipe them out.