Emerging Treatments for Cancer

The innovative medical approach of immunotherapy, harnessing the body's immune system to fight diseases like cancer more effectively. Abstract concept. Generative AI See Less | Image Credit: ©TensorSpark - stock.adobe.com

Emerging modalities for cancer treatment have been advancing, giving patients who have not responded to other treatments hope. Cell and gene therapies, peptides, monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), and vaccines such as messenger RNA, as well as a variety of other treatments have developed in recent years (1).

Sarah Hein, co-founder and CEO of March Biosciences, sees immunotherapies as having a significant impact on oncology treatments. “Immunotherapies allow you to retarget the immune system itself and harness the power of the immune system to directly fight the cancer within the body,” Hein says. “And for the first time, you are seeing curative, potentially, responses [in] a large number of patients who are achieving long-term, durable remissions. Some of these are usually just uninhibiting the immune system, but where we’ve really been leaning into is the cell therapies, where you can engineer and turbocharge those cells directly to target a cancer.”

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells are one such innovation. FDA approved the first CAR T-cell therapy for acute lymphoblasic leukemia in children in 2017 with other CAR T-cell therapies to treat adults with blood cancers approved in the following years (2).

CAR T-cells are made from a patient’s own T cells, which makes them unique. Blood is collected from the patient and the T cells are separated, which are then sent to a lab to be genetically engineered to produce CAR proteins. Those engineered cells are then grown to create the product given to the patient (2).

Cell therapies

According to Jason Bock, co-founder and CEO of CTMC, cell therapies leverage the body’s own system to do what these cells naturally do. “Primarily, these are single-dose treatments that we’re getting,” Bock says. “These cell responses can persist in the body for months, and sometimes we’ve seen not rare examples of these cells persisting for even years.”

“Your immune cells are actually what’s surveying your body,” Hein explains. “They can prevent cancers. They can find early cancers and eliminate it entirely. And so, if you look at a tumor, really, that’s a failure of your immune system in some way, it hasn’t been able to do that job. When you take a cell therapy, then you’re actually harvesting the immune cells from the patient and then boosting them in some way to help them do that job that they’re supposed to do.”

Cell therapies for cancer treatment have been focused on CAR T-cells, according to Bock, but these treat only a small number of cancer types, such as blood cancers. “Another emerging treatment option is tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), which are focused on treating solid tumors, such as lung and cervical cancers, a step forward in fighting 90% of cancers,” says Bock. “[For TILs], we take circulating lymphocytes and engineer them to attack very specific tumors,” Bock explains.

“TILs have been around for decades, especially in academic centers, and have a slightly different approach, where we take a piece of the tumor and extract the cells, the immune cells that [have] already found their way into the tumor and are presumably fighting that tumor, and then we can have methods to expand, in some ways, rejuvenate those cells to large numbers and then reinfuse those to the same patient,” says Bock. “Another really exciting aspect about TILs is that they have inherent specificity for the tumor that allows us the opportunity to further genetically engineer them for improved fitness, persistence, or durability.”

Bock is excited about the regulatory pathway created by the first commercially approved TIL which has fostered development of the genetically engineered TILs that are currently in clinical trials. “Some companies have shown some very exciting clinical results for those thus far,” Bock says. “Obsidian Therapeutics comes to mind, [which] released some nice clinical data last year, and is a partner with CTMC. Others are in the clinic with new genetic engineering or gene editing approaches that I think are going to unlock further potential in the TIL field in the years to come. That should help us expand TILs from primarily being focused on melanoma to other solid tumor indications [such as] lung cancer, or, hopefully, even more difficult-to-treat cancers [such as] pancreatic cancer.”

Because cell therapies are complicated and are living cells taken from a person and then engineered to be reproducible and reintroduced to that person, there is variability from patient to patient, which creates challenges for manufacturing, says Bock. Good science and engineering are necessary to design robust processes, according to Bock. The circular supply chain of cell therapies, however, is one way to deal with the complexity.

“With cell therapies, the supply chain really begins and ends with the same patient,” Bock says. “And so, if we take into account that shape, if you will, of the supply chain, how can we engineer manufacturing to take that into account?” To simplify the supply chain, CTMC has positioned its manufacturing facility right next to the MD Anderson Cancer Center, as well as other hospitals. “We take all the logistics out of shipping starting material and shipping the final product back to the hospital. We don’t need airplanes. We don’t need to worry about travel schedules or anything, or even the amount of time that that takes. We can essentially get in a shuttle bus and be back and forth with the patient sample in a matter of minutes.”

Hein points to the industry investment in understanding and shortening the manufacture of cell therapies, “understanding how to minimally manipulate those cells to keep them as healthy as possible, as close to their sort of native vigor as you can from the patient” as a way to combat the complexity. “What’s really exciting, and I think somewhat under-appreciated, is the implementation of more rapid testing and release processes, so we can do all the same tests that we have to do to ensure the quality and vigor of the product, but do it more quickly, so that way we can bring the product back to the patient as quickly as possible.”

Advancements in automation will also help overcome some of the challenges of cell therapies, according to Hein. “The combination of an automated platform, automated manufacturing alongside reduced manufacturing timelines, I think, is going to really open up the ability to take this from the 30,000 patients that have already been treated with cell therapy to the hundreds and thousands of patients and even millions of patients in the future, as these technologies continue to grow and scale,” she says.

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About the author

Susan Haigney is lead editor for BioPharm International®.

Article details

BioPharm International®
Next-Generation Biotherapeutics eBook
April 2025
Pages: 8–12

Citation

When referring to this article, please cite it as Haigney, S. Emerging Treatments for Cancer. BioPharm Internation Next-Generation Biotherapeutics eBook, 2025 April.