Trick or treat? 🎃
Halloween may have come and gone, but for lead Investigator Dr. Anthony Conley and his colleagues from MD Anderson Cancer Center, the answer is both.
Dr. Conley et al. want to continue to treat with AdAPT-001 based on promising results in advanced soft-tissue sarcomas and other tumors.
Their hope is that AdAPT-001 will trick tumor cells to make thousands and thousands of copies of the genetic material of AdAPT-001 instead of their own. This genetic material includes the TGF-β trap that AdAPT-001 carries.
The TGF-β trap is a literal trap that ensnares the apex predatory cytokine, TGF-β, which many tumors including sarcomas overexpress to escape from the immune system.
The message that AdAPT-001 will hopefully send to tumors is the refrain from that Tom Petty hit song, “Don’t Come Around Here No More” (https://bit.ly/3FBGKD3.)
Last week, Dr. Anthony Conley provided updates on the progress of “AdAPT-001 in Advanced Soft-Tissue Sarcoma (BETA PRIME): A Multicenter, Open-label, Phase I/2 Clinical Trial” at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC)’s #SITC23.
To date, AdAPT-001 has demonstrated evidence of local and abscopal activity both with and without checkpoint inhibitors in over 50 patients and in the absence of any dose limiting toxicities or related serious adverse events (SAEs).
From our perspective, this kind of activity and tolerability is scary good on Halloween or any other day, so EpicentRx and Dr. Conley were excited to get the word out.