Viennese Biotech Company Wants to “Boost” Cancer Immunotherapy

At the annual congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) currently underway in Madrid (until October 24th), new immunotherapy against cancer is a major focus. There, the Viennese biotech company Hookipa Pharma has presented the first positive results of a type of vaccination in addition to immunotherapy for malignant ENT tumors.

“Preliminary data presented at the congress (…) showed a confirmed objective response of 42 percent and a 74 percent disease control rate in 19 patients whose findings could be evaluated. This was with HB-200 and pembrolizumab in first-line immunotherapy treatment and doubled the objective response rate compared to treatment with pembrolizumab alone,” the Viennese biotech company wrote.

One of the patients experienced a complete remission of tumor disease, seven subjects registered a partial response, and six sufferers entered a stable phase, it said. The subjects enrolled in the study had relapsed or developed metastases after initial treatment for an ENT tumor. The mean duration of observation was 8.3 months.

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How the Viennese biotech company plans to increase the efficacy of pembrolizumab

The background: The immunotherapeutic agent pembrolizumab (monoclonal antibody), which is designed to reactivate the body’s defense system against cancer cells by inhibiting a so-called immune checkpoint, has been used successfully for several years in a whole range of carcinoma conditions and is being further researched. But at the same time, efforts are also being made to increase its effectiveness even further.

This is where Hookipa’s work comes in. The Viennese biotech company has developed a type of vaccine based on genetically modified arenaviruses. In the case of HB-200, these are vectors based on the LCM virus (found primarily in mice) and the Pichinde virus (PICV). These “vehicles” are harmless to humans, but with administration, they introduce the genetic material for the E6/E7 antigens of human papillomaviruses (HPV16) into the organism of the treated. Many ENT tumors develop on the basis of chronic persistent HPV infections.

The Viennese biotech company has developed a type of vaccine based on genetically modified arenaviruses

The increased appearance of E6/E7 antigens promoted by the vectors is supposed to bring an immune response by specifically acting CD8 T lymphocytes, which kill tumor cells. At the same time, the checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab is thought to stimulate T cells to greater activity, which is often severely inhibited in cancer. The monoclonal antibody blocks the so-called PD-1 receptor on immune cells, making them “sharp” again against malignant cells.

The study presented in Madrid was conducted by Dr. Alan Ho, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. For Hookipa CEO Joern Aldag, the results are important for the future: the company plans to launch a study for patients with malignant ENT tumors based on this treatment concept next year.

At that time, however, there will also be a control group to enable a comparison to be made with the previously established therapy. The aim is to gather more objective evidence of improved efficacy of immunotherapy with the monoclonal antibody alone. Internationally, there are many approaches aimed at increasing the effect of the new immunotherapy, for the development of which there was the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2018.

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(Featured image by National Cancer Institute via Unsplash)

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First published in Austria Press Agentur. A third-party contributor translated and adapted the article from the original. In case of discrepancy, the original will prevail.

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