Cancer therapy has historically been limited to the three pillars of treatment – surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Each poses their own benefits, risks and limitations. Together with better diagnosis, these three pillars have been refined over many decades to the point where some cancers are not necessarily considered “the death sentence it used to be”. However, there were still almost 10 million deaths worldwide attributable to cancer in 2020 – and over 18 million cases diagnosed globally that year.

A new era of cancer therapy has been brewing for some time now. Immunotherapy and radiopharmaceuticals are two relatively new areas of oncology that are at the forefront of next generation cancer treatment. With a limited number of approvals and a robust pipeline of clinical trials, their overall development is still in its infancy. It’s important to understand the basic mechanics of how they work, but also the same of the ‘three pillars’ – which are still usually the first lines of treatment.

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapies work by stimulating or suppressing a patient’s immune system to fight cancer. One of the most exciting clinical applications in this field has been Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CAR) -T cell therapy, which changes the genes of T-cells (white blood cells that are part of the immune system) to find and destroy cancer cells.

Prescient’s OmniCAR platform is aiming to address key challenges of current generation CAR-T therapies by making treatments safer, more effective, more affordable and longer lasting. For example, a key limitation of CAR-T therapy is T-cell associated toxicities. There have been many unfortunate incidents of T-cells going rogue and causing horrific damage to patients. While this is a complex issue to tackle, PTX’s OmniCAR platform gives clinicians unprecedented control over T-cells – allowing oncologists to switch them off once they’re infused to immediately stop treatment.

Targeted therapies

Targeted therapies are also addressing specific mutations or proteins that cause cancer.  PTX-100 is Prescient Therapeutics’ first-in-class targeted therapy that has shown encouraging clinical activity in a difficult-to-treat patient population and an area of high unmet need – a blood cancer known as peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL). PTX-100 continues to exhibit an excellent safety profile, even at its new highest dose of 2,000mg/m2. PTX-100 was recently granted Orphan Drug Designation by the US FDA for PTCL. 

Currently available therapies for PTCL are typically characterised by high occurrence of serious toxicities; low response rates (<30%) and short duration of responses (3-4 months). There are more than 5,600 cases per year in the US. A common therapy currently used is Folotyn, which costs more than US$450,000 per year, per patient, and comes with a high risk of serious adverse side effects.

Chemotherapy

Whilst chemotherapy drugs have been used for decades, their side effects can be severe, as they can indiscriminately kill cancer cells and healthy cells alike. Often, the side effects can be considered as daunting as the malignancy itself. Patients can expect to incur heart, kidney, nerve and lung damage, infertility, hair loss, bleeding, fatigue and nausea.  The quality of life for these patients can be severely impacted.

Surgery

All surgeries have their own risks, whether it be from navigating the intricacies of the human body without disturbing anything other than the target, to anaesthetic and infection. While the primary goal is to remove as much cancer from the body as possible, surgical treatment for cancer takes many different forms. The standard practice would be to remove all cancerous tissue as well as the some healthy tissue surrounding it, with the consideration that localised lymph may need to be removed to prevent the cancer spreading. Surgeons also engage in what is called Mohs surgery, which involves carefully removing cancer layer by layer and testing each layer to ensure the process is stopped once healthy tissue is reached. There are many instances where tumours are in areas of the body that are too dangerous to operate on, such as the brain, or are inaccessible. There are also instances where tumours are attached to vital organs that must be removed to eliminate the cancer, with severe negative impacts on daily life. Such examples would include the pancreas, which upon removal would immediately render a patient diabetic.

Radiation therapy

Then there is radiation therapy, which involves shooting high-energy beams of radiation from an external machine that is aimed at the cancer in the body. It works by destroying the genetic material that controls how cells grow and divide. While it is used as a primary, adjuvant and neoadjuvant therapy, its main downside is that it also destroys healthy cells. Once again, other cancers can also develop from this treatment.

Radiopharmaceuticals

Radiopharmaceuticals harness the power of radiation but aim to deploy it with absolute precision. It’s emerging as a safe and effective targeted approach to treating many types of cancer. Radiation is systemically or locally delivered using pharmaceuticals that either bind preferentially to cancer cells or accumulate by physiological mechanisms. They hold both diagnostic and therapeutic capability, depending on the level of energy utilised. Compared with almost all other systemic cancer treatment options, RPT has shown efficacy with minimal toxicity.

Biotech companies race to find superior oncology treatments

Overcoming the limitations of cancer therapies is ultimately up to the persistence and determination of the biotech companies pursuing their commercialisation. Prescient Therapeutics is developing a variety of immunotherapy treatments capable of minimising the adverse side effects from current generation treatments. Prescient has seen excellent safety and efficacy data from their personalised cell therapies and owns the exclusive rights to two vital CAR-T platform technologies, OmniCAR and CellPryme – both with the potential to elevate and enhance CAR-T therapies – offering hope in the field for patients and medical professionals alike.

Join Prescient CEO and MD Steven Yatomi-Clarke for an investor briefing Friday, 10th February at 12pm (AEDT), where he will discuss the progress made over recent months and discuss the upcoming catalysts across PTX-100 and PTX-200 targeted therapies and the OmniCAR and CellPryme platforms. Click here to book in.

Reach Corporate provides Corporate Advisory Services, including managing investor communications on behalf of Prescient Therapeutics Limited and may receive fees for its services.

Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.

Sources:

• Science.org, Cancer immunotherapy comes of age
• World cancer Research Fund International, Global cancer data by country
• World cancer Research Fund International, Cancer
• Pubmed.gov, A brand new era of cancer immunotherapy: breakthroughs and challenges
• cancer.gov, Radiopharmaceuticals: Radiation Therapy Enters the Molecular Age
• cancer.gov, T cell
• cancer.org, CAR T-cell Therapy and Its Side Effects
• Prescient Therapeutics, US FDA Grants Orphan Drug Designation to PTX-100 for PTCL
• Prescient Therapeutics, brief
• nature.com, CAR-T cell therapy: current limitations and potential strategies
• mayoclinic.org, Cancer surgery: Physically removing cancer
• Pancreatic Cancer UK, Healthy eating and type 3c diabetes after surgery to remove pancreatic cancer
• mayoclinic.org, Radiation therapy
• Nature.com, Radiopharmaceutical therapy in cancer: clinical advances and challenges