Immunotherapy: How the Immune System Fights Cancer
2018
Immunotherapy uses the body’s immune system to fight cancer. This animation explains three types of immunotherapy used to treat cancer: nonspecific immune stimulation, T-cell transfer therapy, and immune checkpoint inhibitors.
Copy / paste i fra Transcript Q3 2019 Targovax ASA Earnings Call
Cancer therapy has gone through a paradigm shift with the introduction of immunotherapy, and this shift has been led by the checkpoint inhibitors that have cured thousands of patients and is now a $20 billion market.
So at least in Europe, you will get on my clinical trial. And as you can see, the patients that we had, mostly treated in the U.S. East Coast, they have been through 2 or 3 previous immunotherapies. So they were heavily pretreated. They were old and they were sick. What we did was to give them ONCOS for 1 week. Then we gave them – put them back on the checkpoint inhibitor. And of course, the hope is that we have immune activated the patients in the meantime. We produce the T-cells that the patients need in order to respond to a checkpoint inhibitor, again, which, in our case, was KEYTRUDA. And the results were good. Safety, as always, has never been a problem with ONCOS-102. And also in this trial, as we’ve seen in other trials, the immune activation is very strong, it’s very robust, both on a lesion level and on a systemic level. But of course, the highlight here is the 33% ORR, meaning that 3 out of 9 patients, they actually had a reduction of their tumor burden by more than 30%.
HIGHLIGHTS FOR THE THIRD QUARTER 2019
- Targovax announced data from part 1 of the ONCOS-102 trial in checkpoint inhibitor refractory advanced melanoma, showing validated clinical responses in three out of nine patients (33% ORR), including one patient with a complete response and immune activation in all nine patients
- The expansion part of the phase I/II trial of ONCOS-102 in combination with the checkpoint inhibitor Imfinzi in patients with advanced peritoneal malignancies opened for enrollment as the dose escalation part of the trial concluded successfully
- Targovax announced the opening of Oslo University Hospital as site for ONCOS-102 trial in melanoma
POST-PERIOD HIGHLIGHTS
- In October, Targovax was selected for oral presentation at Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) 2019 Annual Meeting. The presentation will be given bv Dr. Alexander Shoushtari, Principal Investigator of ONCOS-102 trial in melanoma, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NYC
Øystein Soug, CEO commented “Oncolytic viruses are increasingly recognized as an important future class of immune activators, and Targovax is well positioned as one of the leaders in this rapidly evolving field. Currently, our main focus is to deliver the expected data read-outs from our ongoing ONCOS-102 combination trials in 2020, which we hope will solidify Targovax position as a leader in the oncolytic virus space.”
