Neogap is developing a personalized Tumor Trained Lymphocyte (pTTL) therapy, which takes the patients’ own T cells and enhances them to enable them to fight cancer better.
It does this by training a patient’s T cells to recognize neoantigens, which are specific to a patient’s tumor.
The company reported this week that the first two patients have now been treated in its Phase I/II clinical trial, which is taking place in three sites in Sweden: Karolinska University Hospital, Danderyd’s Hospital, and Västmanland Hospital.
The patients being recruited for the trial have stage IV metastatic colorectal cancer. The trial is ongoing, but the investigators hope to recruit up to 16 patients in total.
“We are delighted to have treated the first patients – this is a significant milestone in our clinical trial and our mission to develop curative treatments for critically ill cancer patients. We have an outstanding trial team and look forward to the upcoming results,” says Samuel Svensson, CEO of NEOGAP Therapeutics.
It’s early days, but if effective and safe this approach could give hope to people who currently have very few treatment avenues to explore.
Personalizing cancer therapy
The company has developed a process to identify the specific neoantigens that a patient’s tumor is expressing, use them as protein targets. A software program known as PIOR helps to identify the right neoantigens using machine learning drawing on data from the patient and from past data from healthy individuals and others with cancer.
As a first treatment step, the PIOR program identifies up to 36 neoantigens that are suitable targets. Neogap then makes a treatment using its EpiTCer bead technology that can target the right neoantigens.
These beads are taken up by antigen-presenting cells such as macrophages or dendritic cells. These cells then identify the contents as ‘foreign’ and the antigen-presenting cells show the patients T cells what they should be targeting. In this way, the T cells target the patient’s cancer in a more specific way.
Chimeric-antigen receptor (CAR) T cell receptor therapy has received a lot of media attention in the past decade, as a powerful way to treat advanced blood cancers. The CAR T cell therapy approach involves extracting patient T cells, modifying them to target their cancer and then reinjecting them into the patient.
Neogap’s approach involves retraining a patient’s T cells, but no modification of the T cells is carried out in the lab. Instead, the company uses its EpiTCer beads to train T cells to fight the patients cancer by training them in the lab and then reinfusing them into the body to create a highly tailored therapy.