One of our favorite quotes from the gleefully stupid film, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which good-naturedly pokes fun at NASCAR culture, is, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
The opposite is true for lead EpicentRx therapy, AdAPT-001, whose motto could well read “if you ain’t first, the response will last” or even “first is worst.”
That’s because tumors are actively immunosuppressive and it takes time, usually 3-4 months, for AdAPT-001 to work its magic on them and to reprogram the immune response.
In fact, initially, in the three-way race between virus replication, immune activation and tumor growth, it is usually the latter that wins out.
But the race is not lost, far from it, because data from the ongoing Phase 2 clinical trial, BETA PRIME, has shown that, in general, the more times and the longer that AdAPT-001 is administered, the better the chance for an effective antitumor immune response to develop either alone or in combination with a previously tried and failed checkpoint inhibitor.
It would not be helpful if AdAPT-001 were to come out hard and fast against tumors only to gas out down the stretch at a critical time when patients are most in need. To stay in the race over the long term, AdAPT-001 needs to avail itself of help from the immune system, which it must awaken from a tumor-induced state of dormancy. This can take many months—or sometimes even longer, as the transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ) trap that AdAPT-001 expresses slowly tips the balance in favor of an antitumor immune response.
When the long-dormant immune system finally shakes off the rust with the help of AdAPT-001 and its TGFβ trap, it’s “shake and bake” time, to use a phrase from Talladega Nights, because positive responses usually are not far behind—sometimes even complete or long-lasting responses as we have repeatedly seen on the Phase 2 BETA PRIME clinical trial.