Biotech Strategy Blog

Commentary on Science, Innovation & New Products with a focus on Oncology, Hematology & Immunotherapy

About Pieter Droppert

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Posts by Pieter Droppert

Targeting NK cells effectively in AML

Continuing our NK cell series, we turn to a different area of work within this niche, namely how cytokines can help boost effectiveness of the clinical responses in hematologic malignancies through their impact on memory-like cells.

Spring is in the air!

This is an important aspect to consider bearing in mind that while NK cells can be useful in attacking cancer cells, they are also notoriously more fickle and less durable than their T cell cousins in sustaining cytlotic effects.

How can this be fixed? What therapeutic approaches might be potentially useful in addressing the problem?

To find out more, we spoke to a learned clinician-scientist involved in research in this arena to learn more about what he had to say and also discover why a molecule they are working on in early clinical development is starting to look quite promising.

The good news is that it may also have utility in solid tumours as well, through the effects that it induces.

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New Horizons in Pancreatic Cancer

MD Anderson Cancer Center

Houston, Texas – Advanced pancreatic cancer is a very tough disease to treat, so it is not surprising that by 2030 it will be the No. 2 cancer killer in the United States, according to one of the speakers at the recent 1st Annual Symposium on Pancreatic Cancer held at the MD Anderson Cancer Center earlier this week.

There’s also high unmet medical need for new effective therapies for pancreatic cancer, which is why events that promote collaboration and cross-fertilization among leading experts are important.

I found out about the event from Twitter thanks to tweets by Dr Anirban Maitra (@aiims1742) who shares a lot of information. Do follow him if you don’t already.

Thank you to everyone at MD Anderson for putting on a panel of excellent speakers. The meeting was well worth attending and I hope it will become an annual event.

In this post I’ve captured some of the key take-homes that I took from the symposium.

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Potential of Exosomes in Pancreatic Cancer

MD Anderson, Houston

Houston, Texas – At the First Annual Symposium on Pancreatic Cancer organized by Ronald DePinho MD and colleagues at the MD Anderson Cancer Center on Monday, one of the presentations that caught my attention was on exosomes.

Raghu Kalluri MD PhD (@KalluriLab) gave an excellent talk on, “Exploiting the Biology of Exosomes for Diagnosis and Therapy of Pancreatic Cancer.”

What were some of the key take homes from his presentation?

He kindly spoke to BSB in Houston and talked about the direction he is going in this rapidly evolving field of research.

Here’s a short snippet from the interview where he talks about one aspect of this approach and how it might be useful (the others are covered in more detail below):

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Future of CAR T Cell Therapy for Leukemia and Lymphoma

Salt Lake City – at the 2018 BMT Tandem meeting (Twitter: #BMTTandem18) the combined annual meeting of the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (ASBMT) and Center for International Blood & Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR), one of the presentations of note today was a 7am breakfast symposium entitled:

“Realizing the Promise of CAR T cell Therapy for Leukemia and Lymphoma: Implications for Long-term Care in the Era of Stem Cell Transplantation.”

Cancer cells in culture Source: Dr Cecil Fox, National Cancer Institute

This educational session supported by grants from Kite/Gilead and Novartis, featured two BMT transplant experts with hands-on experience of CAR T cell trials: Dr Stephan Grupp (@GruppSteve) from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Dr Krishna Komanduri (@drkomanduri) from the University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.

We’ve previously interviewed both Dr Grupp and Dr Komanduri on BSB, so were keen to hear how leading transplanters view the CAR T landscape now that two therapies have been approved by the FDA, and how they think this approach will integrate with transplants, and which patients will benefit most from this therapy.

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The death of PD-L1 in urothelial cancer

Prof Tom Powles GU18 Title SlideAt the 2018 ASCO Genitourinary Cancer Symposium, one of the standout keynote lectures was from Professor Tom Powles, Director of the Bart’s Cancer Cancer Center in London who talked about “Immune checkpoint inhibitors in Urothelial Cancer: which one and why?”

We’ve been following the highs and lows around checkpoint inhibitors in bladder cancer for some time, so it was interesting to hear what Prof Powles had to say in San Francisco.

How does he see the landscape evolving for immune checkpoint inhibitors?

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Apalutamide is not a winner at ASCO GU

Red Bull Air Race NYC

San Francisco: Today at the 2018 American Society for Clinical Oncology Genitourinary Cancer Symposium, commonly known as ASCO GU (Twitter #GU18), Dr Eric Small (UCSF) will present the results of the SPARTAN phase 3 trial (Link to abstract):

SPARTAN, a phase 3 double-blind, randomized study of apalutamide (APA) versus placebo (PBO) in patients with nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (nmCRPC).

Despite the fact this is a positive trial and apalutumide will most likely gain regulatory approval for this indication in the United States, the data presented at ASCO GU is not a winner when viewed in the broader context of the prostate cancer landscape.

BSB subscribers can login to understand why, and also gain the perspective of a global thought leader familiar with both the SPARTAN and PROSPER trial data.

On a day when J&J have just announced that abiraterone (in combination with prednisone) provides a new treatment option for patients with metastatic high-risk castration-sensitive prostate cancer based on the results from the randomised phase 3 LATITUDE study, everyone’s attention is focused on the battle between SPARTAN (apalutamide) and PROSPER (enzalutamide) in M0 disease.

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Go Forth and PROSPER

The abstract has just been published for the phase 3 PROSPER trial to be presented later this week at ASCO GU in San Francisco (#GU18).

@Daniel_J_George

PROSPER: A phase 3, randomized, double-blind, placebo (PBO)- controlled study of enzalutamide (ENZA) in men with nonmetastatic castration resistant prostate cancer (M0 CRPC).

Earlier today Dr Daniel George (pictured), one of the investigators, kindly spoke to BSB about how he interprets the trial data and what it may mean for the treatment of prostate cancer.

Dr George (@Daniel_J_George) is Professor of Medicine and Surgery, and Director of Genitourinary Oncology at the Duke Cancer Institute.

Should men with non-metastatic CRPC receive enzalutamide in order to PROSPER?

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How Will Adoptive Cell Therapy Crack Solid Tumours?

How Will Adoptive Cell Therapy Crack Solid Tumours? – This was the provocative question raised by the title of Dr Malcolm Brenner’s keynote lecture at the 2018 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium held last week in San Francisco, ”Adoptive T cell Therapy: Target Solid Tumors by CARs or TCRs?”

Malcolm K Brenner, MD PhD is the Director of the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

ASCO have just named CAR-T cell immunotherapy as its “2018 Cancer Advance of the Year” so it’s timely to take a look at where we are in the adoptive cell therapy field and where it may be going?

We’ve been writing about adoptive cell therapies (ACT) such as CAR T cell therapy since 2011.  Indeed, I vividly recall one of my early interviews about it at ASH 2013 (See post: Juno Therapeutics takes on Novartis and seeks to revolutionize the treatment of blood cancers – an interview with Renier Brentjens)”.

In recent years, CAR T cell therapy has made tremendous progress in hematologic malignancies, gaining FDA approval last year in relapsed/refratory paediatric ALL and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). We have not seen the same efficacy in solid tumours as yet, and this remains one of the key challenges in the field today.

In this post, we take a look at the perspectives Dr Brenner offered in his keynote lecture at ASCO-SITC and the potential impact they may have on the landscape.

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The STING and Metastasis Controversy Reignited

Last week we reported on a paper published in Nature by Bakhoum et al that raised the provocative question, Can STING agonists promote metastasis? (Link to BSB post).

As Dr Bakhoum subsequently tweeted an image from the research made the front page of the print edition of Nature:

In this latest post, we continue the story with a perspective on this research from one of the world’s leading experts on the science behind the STING (stimulator of Interferon genes) pathway.

Glen N. Barber, PhD is Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and holds the Eugenia J. Dodson Chair in Cancer Research.

He has published extensively on the biology of STING and targeting the innate immune system.

In science we often hear that the truth is what the data tells us, but what does the data by Bakhoum et al really tell us and what conclusions can we draw from it that will guide future translational and clinical research?

Dr Barber kindly spoke to BSB at his office in the Papanicolaou Cancer Research building at the UM medical school and offers a perspective that reignites the controversy over STING and Metastasis.

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Immune Landscape of Pancreatic Cancer

At the recent ASCO 2018 Gastrointestinal Cancer Symposium (GI18), Steven. D Leach MD (Dartmouth) gave an excellent Keynote Lecture on “Mapping the Immune Landscape in Pancreatic Cancer.”

Pancreatic cancer has very poor outcomes, with a one-year relative survival rate (across all stages of the disease of 20%) and five-survival rate of 7% according to the American Cancer Society.  In addition, stage IV exocrine pancreatic cancer has a 5 year survival of about 1%, which is utterly dismal to say the least.

When it comes to cancer immunotherapy, so far we’ve not seen the success in pancreatic cancer that we’ve seen in other tumours, there are no FDA approved cancer immunotherapies for this disease.

Which raises a critical question of what is happening in the immune landscape of pancreatic cancer patients, and how will cancer immunotherapy be effective?

In this post, we discuss some of the key points that Dr Leach made in excellent presentation and look at some new developments on the horizon in PDAC.

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