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Candel Therapeutics’ (NASDAQ: CADL) Lead Candidate CAN-2409 Combats Lung, Pancreatic And Prostate Cancers With Fast Track Designation For Three Cancers
--News Direct--By Jeremy Golden, BenzingaImmunotherapy has transformed the way cancer is treated, but just 20% to 40% of patients typically respond to
About this update from Candel Therapeutics, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"--News Direct--By Jeremy Golden, BenzingaImmunotherapy has transformed the way cancer is treated, but just 20% to 40% of patients typically respond to FDA-approved immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatments. Poor ICI treatment response has been linked to the tumor’s ability to disguise antigen presentation and generate an immunosuppressive microenvironment. In addition, most conventional immunotherapies are not designed to educate the patient’s immune system on how to recognize a variety of tumor antigens and neoantigens.Amid this landscape, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company has developed a new multimodal biological approach that leverages the ability of viral gene constructs to activate cancer-killing mechanisms, exposing multiple tumor antigens to the immune system, resulting in vaccination against the tumor while inhibiting the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Candel Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: CADL) is developing a product candidate that is being studied in lung, pancreatic and prostate cancers. Candel’s most advanced viral immunotherapy candidate, CAN-2409, is an investigational off-the-shelf replication-defective adenovirus designed to induce an individualized, systemic immune response against the patient’s own tumor. Part of the company’s adenovirus platform, CAN-2409 is injected directly into the tumor or target tissue using a localized injection, akin to the standard approach for vaccination. CAN-2409's adenoviral construct serves as a vector to transport the HSV-thymidine kinase gene into tumor cells at the site of injection. These tumor cells can then express HSV-thymidine kinase, which converts generic, FDA-approved anti-herpes drugs – such as ganciclovir, acyclovir and valacyclovir – into a toxic nucleotide analog that blocks DNA synthesis in dividing cells.Cancer cells exposed to the toxic nucleotide analog in the tumor microenvironment have been observed to undergo immunogenic cell death. Simultaneously, the adenoviral serotype 5 capsid protein elicits a strong pro-inflammatory signal in the tumor microenvironment, creating the optimal conditions to induce a specific CD8+ T cell-mediated response against the injected tumor and uninjected distant metastases for broad and systemic anti-tumor activity.CAN-2409 is currently being studied in an open-label, phase 2 clinical trial in non-small cell lu...