Engineered Viral Immunotherapy Shows Promise Across Multiple Solid Tumors with Dr. Paul Peter Tak Candel Therapeutics

Dr. Paul Peter Tak, President and CEO of Candel Therapeutics, discusses the company's virus-based approach for treating multiple tumor types. Their lead therapy is an oral drug and an engineered adenovirus injected into tumors to deliver a gene that educates the patient's immune cells to recognize and eliminate cancer cells throughout the body. Unlike personalized tumor vaccine approaches, this drug is an off-the-shelf medicine that generates an individualized anti-tumor immune response and is showing encouraging data in trials in pancreatic cancer, brain cancer, ovarian cancer, and prostate cancer.

Paul Peter explains, "Our mission is really to improve patients' lives, whether this is about patients with early localized prostate cancer, for example, who want to live without cancer, or patients at the other side of the spectrum. For example, patients with metastatic, progressive non-small cell lung cancer, a form of lung cancer, who have run out of options, where we try to extend their life with a good quality of life. So basically, we want to improve patients' clinical outcomes."

"We have two investigational medicines that are both engineered viruses. So we try to change the viruses so they do something useful and good for the health of patients. And our lead asset, our lead medicine that's under development, is called aglatimagene. And it's an engineered adenovirus. So it's an adenovirus that cannot replicate, cannot make you sick, but we use it to deliver a gene to the tumor by injecting it into the tumor. And viruses are very good at transporting genes. We hijack that mechanism to get the beneficial effect. And ultimately, we combine aglatimagene with a tablet. So tablets that are taken orally for two weeks are activated under the influence of the virus in the tumor. And that will ultimately lead to the education of the patient's own immune cells in such a way that these immune cells start to recognize and eliminate the tumor cells throughout the body."

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