Category Archives: tumor microenvironment

THE NEXT GREAT DRUG HUNT: Integrins, TGF-beta and Drug Development in Oncology and Fibrosis

April 5, 2020biologics, immunotherapy, integrins, monoclonal antibodies, oncology, TGF beta, tumor microenvironmentPaul Rennert

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PART 1: Integrin αvβ8

Advances in our understanding of the regulation and function of TGF-β is driving novel drug development for the treatment of diverse diseases. This is a field I’ve followed for a long time and of course in the development of cell therapeutics we (www.aletabio.com) always have an eye on immunosuppressive pathways – indeed, the immunotherapy and cell therapy fields cross-fertilize often and productively (see http://www.sugarconebiotech.com/?m=202002).

Several new papers in this space have caught my eye and I’m keen to share some key findings. This will be a multi-part post and today I want to talk about an integrin.

Long time readers will appreciate the importance of alpha v-integrin-mediated regulation of TGF-β release from the latent complex (http://www.sugarconebiotech.com/?p=1073). The model that first emerged around 2010 was elegant: various signaling pathways triggered GPCRs that could activate an integrin beta strand (paired with an alpha v integrin) and coordinate the release of TGF-β from the cell surface. Soluble TGF-β, free from restraint, could diffuse across nearby cells and trigger TGF-β-receptor activation. Three integrins have been linked to the regulation of TGF-β release: αvβ6, αvβ8 and αvβ3. The mechanism for releasing TGF-β from the latent complex on the cell surface requires a conformation change in the integrin structure. From this insight emerged diverse drug development efforts targeting specific integrins, targeting the ligands for specific GPCRs and so on. Notable examples include the anti-αvβ6 antibody STX-100 (Biogen), the autotaxin inhibitor GLPG1690 (Galapagos), small molecule inhibitors designed to block integrin conformational change, and isoform-specific anti-TGF-β biologics, among many others. The mechanism of action of these drugs includes reduction of free, active TGF-β and therefore reduced TGF-β-receptor signaling. STX-100 was withdrawn from clinical development due to toxicity – more on this another time. GLPG1690 is now in a Phase III trial (in IPF) having shown anti-fibrotic activity in earlier clinical trials – this drug has had an interesting life, originally partnered by Galapagos with Johnson & Johnson, later returned, and now part of the mega-partnership with Gilead. I’ve previously discussed these and many other drugs in development in the context of fibrosis pathogenesis (http://www.sugarconebiotech.com/?p=1073). We’ll look at novel TGF-β-directed antagonists and their role in immune-oncology in part 2, as part of a long-running thread (http://www.sugarconebiotech.com/?m=201811).

So back to integrins. The dogma that emerged based on work from disparate labs was that an activated integrin was required to release TGF-β from the latent (inactive) complex on cell surfaces, allowing for precise regulation of TGF-β activity. More specifically, this model refers to the release of two of the three isoforms of TGF-β – isoforms 1 and 3. Isoform 2 regulation is different and relies on physical force acting directly on cells to trigger release. Of note, isoform 2 antagonism contributes to the toxicity associated with pan-TGF-β blockade but does not appear to contribute significantly to disease pathology either in fibrosis or in oncology. Therefore, specifically antagonizing TGF-β-1/3 without antagonizing TGF-β-2 is ideal – and the model we’ve just outlined allows for this specificity by targeting specific integrins.

The model that alpha v integrins mediated release of free, active TGF-β has held firm for nearly a decade. Now however there is a fascinating update to this model that involves the αvβ8 integrin. Work from the labs of Yifan Cheng and Steve Nishimura at UCSF has revealed a novel mechanism of TGF-β regulation that has interesting implications for drug development (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.12.030). Uniquely, integrin αvβ8 lacks critical intracellular binding domains that allow an integrin to anchor to actin fibers within the cell. As a result, binding to αvβ8 does not cause the release of TGF-β from the latent complex on the cell surface but rather presents an active form of TGF-β on that cell surface, without release from the latent complex. Importantly the complex formed between αvβ8 and TGF-β is conformationally stable and relies (in their experimental system) on trans-interaction between one cell expressing αvβ8 and a second cell expressing TGF-β as displayed on a latent protein complex (here, containing the GARP protein), and expressing the TGF-β receptors. In this system TGF-β remains anchored to the GARP-complex, but the conformational rotation caused by αvβ8 binding allows anchored TGF-βto interact with TGF-β-RII, thereby recruiting TGF-β-RI and inducing signaling.

The focus on GARP (aka LRRC32) relates to this groups long-standing interest with T-regulatory cells, which uniquely express GARP. Biotech investors will recall the Abbvie/Argenx deal on this target, which is in clinical development (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03821935). A related protein called LRRC33 has been discovered on myeloid lineage cells.

More important, in my view, is that αvβ8 is expressed widely on tumor cells and has been variably reported to correlate with metastases (depending on the indication). This suggests that one means that tumor cells have of inducing TGF-β activation on interacting cells (eg. lymphocytes, myeloid cells and perhaps stromal cells) is via αvβ8 activity. The dependent hypothesis would be that such activation is immunosuppressive for those tumor-interacting cells. This is consistent with the known effects of TGF-β on immune cells in particular, but also stromal cells like fibroblasts. As an aside I like this model as one way of accounting for the appearance of T-regulatory cells and myeloid lineage suppressor cells in the tumor microenvironment as result of, rather than the cause of, immunosuppression, that is, these cells may be epi-phenomena of broad TGF-β-mediated immunosuppression. This may in turn explain why targeting such cells as T-regs and MDSCs has been largely unsuccessful to date as a therapeutic strategy for cancer.

There are some other implications. As the authors point put, the integrin/TGF-β complex is stable, and the binding domain that mediates the interaction is buried with the protein complex. It is unclear whether anti-TGF-β antagonists that target the canonical integrin binding cleft would be able to access this site within the complex. It’s possible that some of these drugs (whether antibodies or small molecules) can’t work in this setting. On the other hand, antibodies to αvβ8 clearly prevent the complex from forming and should block TGF-β-mediated immunosuppressive signaling in settings where αvβ8 expression is dominant. An anti-αvβ8 antibody strategy is being pursued by Venn Therapeutics (disclosure: I sit on Venn’s SAB). Further, the structural features identified in the paper include well-defined pockets that might be suitable for small molecule drugs. Indeed, one of the structural features in the b8 protein, consisting of hydrophobic residues, appears to account for the differential binding of various integrins (β6, β1, β2, β4, β7) to TGF-β, a remarkable finding. Analyses of the differences between the structure of β8 and other β integrins has been extensive across laboratories (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13248-5 for another important paper). Small molecule drug discovery is well underway in this field (see for example Pliant Therapeutics and Morphic Therapeutics) and one might imagine that these novel results found an interested audience in many bio-pharma labs.

Next: what has Scholar Rock been up to, and what can we learn from their work?

Stay tuned.

Radical optimism: considering the future of immunotherapy

November 6, 2018#SITC18, cancer, immuno-oncology, immunotherapy, oncology, Pathological Cells and Processes, Pathways for Drug Development, tumor microenvironment, UncategorizedPaul Rennert

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I wrote recently about the sense of angst taking hold in the next-generation class of immuno-therapeutics – those targets that have come after the anti-CTLA4 and anti-PD-(L)-1 classes, and raised the hope that combination immunotherapy would broadly raise response rates and durability of response across cancer indications.

There are diverse next-generation immuno-therapeutics including those that target T cells, myeloid cells, the tumor stromal cells, innate immune cells and so on. A few examples are given here (and note that only a few programs are listed for each target):

There are of course many other therapeutic targets – OX40/CD134, Glutaminase, ICOS, TIM-3, LAG-3, TIGIT, RIG-1, the TLRs, various cytokines, NK cell targets, etc.

In the last year – since SITC 2017 – there has been a constant stream of negative results in the next generation immuno-therapy space, with few exceptions. Indeed, each program listed in the table has stumbled in the clinic, with either limited efficacy or no efficacy in the monotherapy setting or the combination therapy setting, typically with an anti-PD-(L)-1 (ie. an anti-PD-1 or an anti-PD-L-1 antibody). This is puzzling since preclinical modeling data (in mouse models and with human cell assays) and in some cases, translation medicine data (eg. target association with incidence, mortality, or clinical response to therapy), suggest that all of these targets should add value to cancer treatment, especially in the combination setting. I’ve discussed the limitations of these types of data sets here, nonetheless the lack of success to date has been startling.

With SITC 2018 coming up in a few days (link) I think it is a good time to step back and ask: “what are we missing?”

One interesting answer comes from the rapidly emerging and evolving view of tumor microenvironments (TME), and the complexity of those microenvironments across cancer indications, within cancer indications and even within individual patient tumors. TME complexity has many layers, starting with the underlying oncogenic drivers of specific tumor types, and the impact of those drivers on tumor immunosuppression. Examples include activation of the Wnt-beta catenin pathway and MYC gain of function mutations, which mediate one form of immune exclusion from the tumor (see below), and T cell immunosuppression, respectively (review). In indications where both pathways can be operative (either together or independently, eg. colorectal cancer, melanoma and many others) it is reasonable to hypothesize that different strategies would be needed for combination immuno-therapy to succeed, thereby producing clinical responses above anti-CTLA4 or anti-PD-(L)-1 antibody treatment alone.

A second and perhaps independent layer of complexity is TME geography, which has been roughly captured by the terms immune infiltrated, immune excluded, and immune desert (review). These TME types are illustrated simply here:

The different states would appear to be distinct and self-explanatory: there are immune cells in the tumor (infiltrated), or they are pushed to the periphery (excluded), or they are absent (desert). The latter two states are often referred to as “cold” as opposed to the “hot” infiltrated state. It is common now to propose as a therapeutic strategy “turning cold tumors hot”. The problem is that these illustrated states are necessary over-simplifications. Thus, immune infiltration might suggest responsiveness to immune checkpoint therapy with anti-PD-(L)-1 antibodies, and indeed, one biomarker of tumor responsiveness is the presence of CD8+ T cells in the tumor. But in reality, many tumors are infiltrated with T cells that fail to respond to immune checkpoint therapy at all. The immune excluded phenotype, alluded to above with reference to the Wnt-beta catenin pathway, can be driven instead by TGF beta signaling, or other pathways. The immune desert may exist because of active immune exclusion, lack of immune stimulation (eg. MHC-negative tumors) or because of physical barriers to immune infiltration. Therefore, all three states represent diverse biologies within and across tumor types. Further, individual tumors have different immune states in different parts of the tumor, and different tumors within the patient can also have diverse phenotypes.

There are yet other layers of complexity: in the way tumors respond to immune checkpoint therapy (the “resistance” pathways, see below), the degree to which immune cells responding to the tumor cells are “hardwired” (via epigenetic modification), the metabolic composition of the TME, and so on. Simply put, our understanding remains limited. The effect of this limited understanding is evident: if we challenge tumors with a large enough immune attack we can measure a clinical impact – this is what has been achieved, for example, with the anti-PD-(L)-1 class of therapeutics. With a lesser immune attack we can see immune correlates of response (so something happened in the patient that we can measure as a biomarker) but the clinical impact is less. This is what has happened with nearly all next-generation immuno-therapeutics. As a side note, unless biomarker driven strategies are wedded to a deep understanding of specific tumor responsiveness to the therapeutic they can be red herrings – one example may be ICOS expression, although more work is needed there. Understanding specific tumor responsiveness is critical regardless of biomarker use, due to the layered complexity of each indication, and even each patient’s tumors within a given indication.

So why should we be optimistic?

I propose that some of the next generation immuno-therapeutics will have their day, and soon, due to several key drivers: first, for some of these classes, improved drugs are moving through preclinical and early clinical pipelines (eg. A2AR, STING). Second, the massive amount of effort being directed toward understanding the immune status of diverse tumors ought to allow more specific targeting of next generation immuno-therapeutics to more responsive tumor types. The TGF beta signature presents a particularly interesting example. Genentech researchers recently published signatures of response and resistance to atezolizumab (anti-PD-L1) in bladder cancer (link). In bladder cancer about 50% of tumors have an excluded phenotype, and about 25% each have an immune infiltrated or immune desert phenotype. The response rate to treatment with atezolizumab was 23% with a complete response rate of 9% (note that responses did not correlate with PD-L1 expression but did correlate with both tumor mutational burden and a CD8+ T cell signature). Non-responding patients were analyzed for putative resistance pathways. One clear signature of resistance emerged – the TGF beta pathway, but only in those patients whose tumor showed the immune excluded phenotype. The pathway signature was associated with fibroblasts, but not myeloid cells, in multiple tumor types. The T cells were trapped by collagen fibrils produced by the fibroblasts:

(The image is a screenshot from Dr Turley’s talk at CICON18 last month).

It follows that a combination of a TGF beta inhibitor and a PD-(L)-1 inhibitor for the treatment of bladder and perhaps other cancers should be used in patients whose tumors show the immune excluded TME phenotype, and perhaps also show a fibroblast signature in that exclusion zone. Indeed, in a recent paper, gene expression profiling of melanoma patients was used to demonstrate that a CD8-related gene signature could predict response to immuno-therapy – but only if the TGF beta signature was low (link).

There are other immunotherapy resistance pathways – some we know and some are yet to be discovered. We should eventually be able in future to pair specific pathway targeting drugs to tumors whose profile includes that pathway’s signature – this has been done, retrospectively, with VEGF inhibitors and anti-PD-(L)-1 therapeutics. This will require a more comprehensive analysis of biopsy tissue beyond CD8+ T cell count and PD-1 or PD-L1 expression – perhaps immunohistochemistry and gene transcript profiling – but these are relatively simple technologies to develop, and adaptable for a hospital clinical lab settings. Not every next generation immuno-therapeutic will succeed as the clinical prosecution becomes more targeted, but some certainly will (we might remain hopeful about adenosine pathway inhibitors, STING agonists, and oncolytic virus therapeutics, to name a few examples).

Another driver of success will be cross-talk with other technologies within immuno-oncology – notably cell therapy (eg. CAR-T) and oncolytic virus technologies. We have already seen the successful adaptation of cytokines, 4-1BB signaling, OX40 signaling and other T cell stimulation pathways into CAR T cell designs, and the nascent use of PD-1 and TGF beta signaling domains in cell therapy strategies designed to thwart immuno-suppression (we should note here that CAR T cells, like tumor infiltrating T cells, will face barriers to activity in different tumor indications). The example of local (and potentially safer) cytokine secretion by engineered CAR-T cells has helped drive the enormous interest in localized cytokine technologies. Most recently, the combination of CAR-T, oncolytic virus and immune checkpoint therapy has shown remarkable preclinical activity.

SITC 2018 – #SITC18 on Twitter – will feature sessions on immunotherapy resistance and response, the tumor microenvironment, novel cytokines and other therapeutics, cell-based therapies, and lessons from immuno-oncology trials (often, what went wrong). We can expect lots of new information, much of it now focused on understanding how better to deploy the many next generation immuno-therapeutics that have been developed.

So, I would argue that “radical optimism” for next generation immunotherapy and immunotherapy combinations is warranted, despite a year or more of clinical setbacks. Much of the underlying science is sound and it is targeted clinical translation that is often lagging behind. Progress will have to come from sophisticated exploratory endpoint analysis (who responded, and why), sophisticated clinical trial inclusion criteria (who to enroll, and why) and eventually, personalized therapeutic application at the level of the indication and eventually the patient.

In the meantime, stay tuned.

Novel Immunotherapeutic Approaches to the Treatment of Cancer: Drug Development and Clinical Application

June 8, 2016ADC, cancer, CAR T cells, Chimeric Antigen Receptor, CRISPR, CRISPR/Cas9, immunotherapy, monoclonal antibodies, News, oncology, tumor microenvironmentPaul Rennert

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Our new immunotherapy book has been published by Springer:

http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319298252

I want to take a moment to acknowledge the stunning group of authors who made the book a success. I’d also like to promote our fund raising effort in memory of Holbrook Kohrt, to whom the volume is dedicated – 5% of net sales will be donated by me, on behalf of all of our authors, the the Cancer Research Institute in New York. So please consider buying the book or just the chapters you want (they can be purchased individually through the link given above.

Now, the authors:

from Arlene Sharpe and her lab (Harvard Medical School, Boston):

Enhancing the Efficacy of Checkpoint Blockade Through Combination Therapies

from Taylor Schreiber (Pelican Therapeutics, Heat Biologics):

Parallel Costimulation of Effector and Regulatory T Cells by OX40, GITR, TNFRSF25, CD27, and CD137: Implications for Cancer Immunotherapy

from Russell Pachynski (Washington University St Louis) and Holbrook Kohrt (Stanford University Medical Center)

NK Cell Responses in Immunotherapy: Novel Targets and Applications

from Larry Kane and Greg Delgoffe (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine):

Reversing T Cell Dysfunction for Tumor Immunotherapy

from Josh Brody and Linda Hammerich (Icahn School of Medicine, Mt Sinai, NYC)

Immunomodulation Within a Single Tumor Site to Induce Systemic Antitumor Immunity: In Situ Vaccination for Cancer

From Sheila Ranganath and AnhCo (Cokey) Nguyen (Enumeral Inc, Cambridge MA)

Novel Targets and Their Assessment for Cancer Treatment

From Thomas (TJ) Cradick, CRISPR Therapeutics, Cambridge MA):

Cellular Therapies: Gene Editing and Next-Gen CAR T Cells

From Chris Thanos (Halozyme Inc, San Diego) and myself:

The New Frontier of Antibody Drug Conjugates: Targets, Biology, Chemistry, Payload

and a second topic covered by Chris Thanos (Halozyme):

Targeting the Physicochemical, Cellular, and Immunosuppressive Properties of the Tumor Microenvironment by Depletion of Hyaluronan to Treat Cancer

and finally, my solo chapter (and representing Aleta Biotherapeutics, Natick MA and SugarCone Biotech, Holliston MA):

Novel Immunomodulatory Pathways in the Immunoglobulin Superfamily

Please spread the word that all sales benefit cancer research and more specifically, cancer clinical trial development and execution through the Cancer research Institute, and as I said, consider buying the book, or the chapters you want to read.

cheers-

Paul

Enumeral update – guest post by Cokey Nguyen, VP, R&D

December 1, 2015Enumeral, immunotherapy, PD-1, pembrolizumab, TIM-3, tumor microenvironmentPaul Rennert

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Paul’s introduction: Enumeral has been sending ’round some interesting updates to several of their programs and I asked for some more detail. Below is a quick primer sent along by Cokey Nguyen. More detail is available in Enumeral’s recent 8K filings, including one that dropped this morning. Also the company will present this and other work at the AACR Tumor Microenvironment Meeting in January (http://www.aacr.org/Meetings/Pages/MeetingDetail.aspx?EventItemID=73#.VlyGS7_QO2k – see below).

New data from Enumeral, by Cokey Nguyen

PD-1 biology in human lung cancer is an active area of research, as these cancers have shown PD-1 blockade responsiveness in clinical trials. Enumeral has a drug discovery effort aimed at generating novel anti-PD-1 antibodies to develop into potential therapeutic candidates. Using a proprietary antibody discovery platform, two classes of PD-1 antagonist antibodies were discovered: the canonical anti-PD-1 antibody which blocks PD-L1/PD-1 interactions and a second class of antibody which is non-competitive with PD-L1 binding to PD-1. These antibodies were validated first in a pre-clinical model of NSCLC using NSG mice with a humanized immune system and a patient derived NSCLC xenograft (huNSG/PDX) (Figure 1). Here either class of antibody demonstrated activity on par with pembrolizumab, confirming that PD-1 blockade can slow tumor growth.

Figure 1

In order to confirm these pre-clinical findings, Enumeral began proof of concept studies with NSCLC samples. The first question was if resident TILs, as found in tumors, could be reinvigorated (Paukken and Wherry, 2015) or if PD-1 blockade is mainly a phenomenon that affects lymph node-specific T cells that have yet to traffic to the tumor. In these studies, Enumeral found PD-1 blockade can, in fact, increase effector T cell function, as readout by IFNg, IL-12, TNFa and IL-6. In addition, in a NSCLC sample that showed PD-1^hi/TIM-3^lo expression, PD-1 blockade strongly upregulated TIM-3 expression (~5% to ~30%, see Figure 2).

Figure 2

In these NSCLC-based studies, it was also found that an anti-PD-1 antibody (C8) which does not bind to PD-1 in the same manner as nivolumab or pembrolizumab (PD-L1 binding site) displays differentiated biology: increased IFNg production and significantly higher levels of IL-12 in these bulk (dissociated) tumor cultures (Figure 3). As IL-12 is thought to be a myeloid derived cytokine, this mechanism of action is not yet well understood, but has been now observed in multiple NSCLC samples as well as in MLR assays.

Figure 3

In these NSCLC studies, while a subset of patient samples demonstrates PD-1 blockade responsiveness, the co-expression of TIM-3 on NSCLC TILs suggests this is a validated path forward to increase the response rate in lung cancer. As with the PD-1 program, armed with a substantial portfolio of diverse anti-TIM-3 binders, Enumeral is actively testing single and dual checkpoint blockade on primary human lung cancer samples.

Look for the companies 2 posters at AACR/TME in January

The Tumor Ecosystem: some thoughts stirred up at the NY International Immunotherapy meeting

October 7, 2015biologics, CAR T cells, CRISPR, Enumeral, immunotherapy, monoclonal antibodies, tumor microenvironment, UncategorizedPaul Rennert

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Ecosystems in tumor immunity

The buzzword ‘ecosystem’ has popped like a spring dandelion, and it is now used everywhere in biotech. I’m as guilty as anyone of rapid adoption: the term does capture essential elements of modern biomedical science. Complex and interlaced, with key control nodes at work at all levels – scientific, financial, clinical, commercial – and also dynamic, constantly driving adaptation, and, we hope, innovation. Scientifically the ecosystem connections are easily spotted. CRISPR technology appears in cellular therapies including TCRs and CAR-Ts as we simultaneously learn that the mechanisms of immune checkpoint suppression deployed by tumor cells can derail genetically engineered CAR T cells as readily as normal T cells. Further, those genetically engineered CAR T cells and TCRs owe their existence in large measure to our newly developed ability to sequence tumors at the individual level, with great sensitivity, to identify novel targets. The whole enterprise in turn requires ever faster, cheaper, smaller and more reliable equipment (RNA spin columns and PCR cyclers and cloning kits and desktop sequencers and on and on) and software to handle the data. Enterprises like these in turn drive discovery and innovation.

Within the tumor is another ecosystem – the tumor microenvironment or TME. While TME is a fine term it does blur the notion that this microenvironment is in nearly all cases part of a larger environment and not a walled-off terrarium (perhaps primary pancreatic cancer is an exception, within its fibrous fortress). The tumor ecosystem is a more encompassing term, allowing for the ebb and flow of vastly different elements: waves of immune cells attempting attack, dead zones of necrotic tissue being remodeled, tendrils of newly forming blood vessels, a fog of lactate, a drizzle of adenosine, energy, builders, destroyers, progenitors, phagocytes, parasites, predators. When viewed this way we might wonder how any single drug could treat a tumor, since it is not a singular thing that we attack with a drug, but an ever-changing world we are seeking to destroy.

So it’s hard to do.

Our understanding of the tumor as a complex entity was first informed by pathology, then microscopy, then histology and immunohistochemistry, myriad other techniques and of course genetics, the latter leading to the identification of tumor oncogenes, tumor epigenetics, tumor mutations (referred to above) etc, etc. This ecosystem – that of the cell and it’s mutational hardware and software (genome and exome, or genotype and phenotype) we can hardly claim to understand at all, not matter how many arrows we might draw on a figure for a paper or a review. A few recent examples: we think that tumor cells adapt to immune infiltration in part by engaging CTLA4 expressed on T cells, and when that fails they secrete IDO1, or express PD-L1 on their cell surface, or the tumor cells direct tumor associated cells to do the work for them – maybe monocytes, or macrophages, perhaps fibroblasts, perhaps the endothelium, i.e. the ecosystem. As we know from studying patterns of response to PD-1 and PD-L1 therapeutics, it is hardly so simple, as patients who don’t express the therapeutic target will respond to therapy and patients who express the therapeutic target sometimes, in fact often, will not respond. Which just says we don’t know what we don’t know, but we’ll learn, the hard way, in clinical trials.

The abundance of therapeutic targets and our lack of knowledge is best displayed, with some irony, when we try to show what we do know, as in this figure from our recent paper on immune therapeutic targets:

from http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v14/n8/full/nrd4591.html

The picture is static, and fails to represent or visualize complexity (spatial, temporal, random, quantum), and we therefore cannot formulate meaningful hypotheses from the representation. Without meaningful hypotheses we just have observations. With observations we can only flail away hopefully, and be happy when we are right 15 or 20% of the time, as is the case with most PD-1 and PD-L1-directed immune therapeutics in most tumor indications, at least as monotherapies. Why focus so on the PD-1 pathway? Because at least for now, it is the singular benchmark immune therapeutic, stunning really in inducing anti-tumor immunity in subsets of cancer patients.

The success of the “PD-1” franchise has created another ecosystem, clinical and commercial. The key approved drugs, and the 3 or 4 moving quickly toward approval, are held by some of the world’s largest drug companies (BMS, Merck, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi, Pfizer, Roche). Playing in that sandbox has proven very lucrative for some small companies, and very difficult for many others. There is competition for resources, for patients, for assets and ideas. This has created new niches in the commercial ecosystem, as companies try to differentiate from each other and carve out their own turf – Eli Lilly for example has focused on TME targets, distinguishing itself from other oncology pharmaceutical companies in choice of targets, followed closely of course by smaller contenders – Jounce, with a T cell program directed at ICOS but perhaps more buzz around their macrophage targeting programs, and Surface, whose targets are kept subterranean for now. Tesaro and others are betting on anti-PD-1 antibodies paired rationally with antibodies to second targets in bispecific format. Enumeral is focused on building rationale for specific combinations of immune therapeutics in specific indications, perhaps even for the right subset of patients within that indication. And so on.

It’s complicated.

Lets imagine you are right now pondering an interesting idea, have a small stake, and want to engage this landscape of shifting ecosystems. What might you do?

Lets start with a novel target. You’ve read some papers, woven together some interesting ideas, formulated some useful hypotheses. The protein has been around, maybe there are patents, but not in the immune oncology space, so you think you might have some freedom to operate. Good, best of both worlds. You dig around, find you can buy your target as purified protein, or find a cell line that expresses the target. Now what? Maybe you would hire an Adimab or Morphosys or X-Body to perform an antibody screen. Different companies, varied technologies, but all directed at antibody discovery. My favorite of this group was X-Body, who had an extraordinary platform to screen human antibody sequences and produce antibodies with really stunning activity and diversity. Juno bought them in early 2015, seeking the antibody platform and a TCR screening platform built with the same technology. I hadn’t seen anything quite so powerful until recently, with the introduction of a novel screening technology from Vaccinex. This platform is about as diverse as the X-Body platform (i.e. ~10⁸ Vh sequences and up to 10⁶ Vl sequences; that’s a lot of possible Vh-Vl pairs). What sets them apart is that the entire selection process happens as full length IgG in mammalian cells rather than surrogates like bacteria or yeast. The net result is a reduction in risk associated with manufacturing. They’ve used it to power their own clinical programs and have selection deals with some big names including Five Prime Therapeutics. Remarkably (I think) you can access their platform to screen targets for your own, i.e. external, use. Their website explains the platform further (http://www.vaccinex.com/activmab/) but here is one nice sample of their work on FZD4 (a nice target by the way):

So now via Vaccinex or someone else you’ve acquired a panel of antibodies that you are ready to test for immune modulatory activity in models that are relevant to immune oncology. You can build out a lab (expensive, time-consuming), find a collaborator with a lab, or find a skilled CRO. The immune checkpoint space was until recently devoid of really focused CRO activity, that is, having diverse modelling capability and careful benchmarking. However, Aquila BioMedical in Scotland, UK placed a solid bet on developing these capabilities around a year ago, and that effort is yielding a terrific suite of assays in both mouse and human cell systems, with multiple readouts, solid benchmarking (e.g. to nivolumab) and careful controls. I like this very much, rich in functional data in a way that a binding assay simply can’t reproduce. Aquila BioMedical seeks to become a driving force in this area, and I like their chances very much: see http://www.aquila-bm.com/research-development/immuno-oncology/ for more information on assays like this IFNgamma secretion assay:

Those are clean and robust data.

Now you come to the point of translation to actual use, that is, targeting an indication. How does one proceed? We can probe the TCGA and other databanks for clues, stare at the IHC data online (not recommended), try to cobble together enough samples to do our own analyses (highly recommended but difficult). The goal is to make some educated guesses about two distinct features of the tumor ecosystem: First, is your target expressed on a relevant cell within the ecosystem (tumor, TME, vasculature, draining lymph nodes, etc) in a specific indication or indications, and second, is that ecosystem likely to respond in a clinically meaningful way to manipulation of your target with your antibody?

That second question is a troubling one. What we are really asking is that we deconstruct the ecosystem and look for clues as to how the therapeutic might impact that ecosystem. What are we looking for during deconstruction? Several things, and they are assessed using diverse techniques, adding to the challenge. First, a highly mutated tumor is more likely to respond to immune therapy, and there are several aspects to these phenomena. One is to understand the underlying genomic changes underpinning the oncogenetics of the tumor: what is driving its ability to outcompete the natural surroundings – in our ecosystem analogy perhaps the tumor can be considered starting out life as an invasive species. Genomic sequencing can accurately identify the mutations that support the tumor, but also a potentially vast array of “passenger” mutations that accumulate when tumors turn off the usual mutation repair machinery. Various algorithms exists that can predict which mutated proteins may be immunogenic, that is, capable of stimulating an anti-tumor immune response. Another method designed to determine if an immune response has in fact be stimulated (and has stalled) is to sequence the mRNA expressed in the tumor: exome sequencing. This will reveal, among other things, what the TCR usage is within the tumor, and that in turn will inform you if there is a very narrow anti-tumor response and a broad one, based on the breadth of TCR clonality. That sounds complex, but really isn’t – suffice to say that a broader TCR response in suggestive of immune potential, leashed T cells awaiting clear orders to attack.

More complex is the nature of those orders, and counter-orders. Various methods are being developed to measure the “quality” of the immune response that confronts the tumor. Are key costimulatory molecules present on T cells that would allow stimulation? Are the T cells instead coated with immunosuppressive receptors? Are the tumor cells masked with inhibitory proteins, are they secreting immunosuppressive factors, have they hidden themselves from immune view by downregulating the proteins that T cells “see” (i.e. the MHC complex). What are the cells within the TME doing? Are they monocytes, macrophages, fibroblasts? Where are the T cells? Within the tumor, or shunted off to the side, at the margin between the tumor and normal tissue? Are NK cells present? And on and on it goes. It seems impossible to answer all these diverse questions.

You might try IHC, as mentioned, or targeted PCR for select genes, and Flow Cytometry to look at the distribution of proteins on various cells, or try deep sequencing. All of this is achievable with equipment, labs and people, or by assembling various collaborators, but all in all, quite a challenge. Very recently an interesting company called MedGenome came to my attention, offering a diverse range of services, starting with neo-epitope prioritization and immune response analyses. These offerings, plus some routine IHC, should give most researchers a comprehensive look into tumor ecosystems, informing indication selection, mechanism of action studies and patient profiling. They explain the technology at http://medgenome.com/oncomd/. This is a schematic they sent me showing their neoepitope prioritization scheme that enriches for peptides that trigger anti-tumor immunity, e.g. in a vaccine setting or perhaps in a cellular therapeutic format.

It’s a good start on democratizing a suite of assays typically available only to specialty academic labs and well-funded biotechs and pharma companies.

So now you’ve gotten your antibodies (Vaccinex), performed critical in vitro (and soon, in vivo) assays (Aquila Biomedical), and analyzed the tumor immune ecosystem for indication mapping (Medgenome).

You’ll have spent some money but moved quickly and confidently forward with your preclinical development program. Your seed stake is diminished though, and it’s time to raise real money. Now what? … now you face the financial/clinical/commercial ecosystem.

stay tuned.

The Tumor Microenvironment “Big Tent” series continues (part 4)

August 27, 2015Astra Zenenca, Bristol Myers Squibb, CSF1R, Halozyme, IDO, immunotherapy, Merck, TAMs, TGFbeta, tumor microenvironment, tumor stromaPaul Rennert

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The Tumor Microenvironment (TME) series to date is assembled here http://www.sugarconebiotech.com/?s=big+tent containing parts 1-3

I’m happy to point you to the most recent content, posted on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/PaulDRennert/im-vacs-2015-rennert-v2

In this deck I review the challenges of the TME particularly with reference to Pancreatic and Ovarian cancers. A few targets are shown below.

Feedback most welcome.

“Combination Cancer Immunotherapy and New Immunomodulatory Targets” published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery

July 31, 20154-1BB, cancer, CD27, CTLA4, GITR, IDO, immunotherapy, ipilimumab, lirilumab, MEDI4736, monoclonal antibodies, MPDL3280A, News, nivolumab, oncology, OX40, PD-1, PD-L1, pembrolizumab, T regulatory cells, TAMs, TGFbeta, TIGIT, TIM-3, TNF receptors, tumor microenvironmentPaul Rennert

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Part of the Article Series from Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, our paper hit the press today

Combination cancer immunotherapy and new immunomodulatory targets. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 14, 561–584. 2015. doi:10.1038/nrd4591

by Kathleen Mahoney, Paul Rennert, Gordon Freeman.

a prepublication version is available here: nrd4591 (1)

How far can a CAR get you?

July 18, 2015CAR T, CAR T cells, Chimeric Antigen Receptor, TCR therapy, TILs, tumor microenvironmentPaul Rennert

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The publication of a paper from scientists at Cellectis (NASDAQ: CLLS) got me thinking. Here is a company with a very interesting idea – to engineer “universal” off-the-shelf CAR T cells by using gene-editing techniques to knock out the elements of an allogeneic T cell that would render it visible to the host immune system. The result – an immunologically “quiet” CAR T cell that you could give to any patient needing the treatment. Sounds good I think. Two things though:

FIRST, some definitions.

A CAR T cell is typically a cancer patient-derived T lymphocyte that is genetically engineered to express a hybrid molecule on its cell surface that can both recognize and then signal the destruction of a cancer cell. The T lymphocyte is most often a cytotoxic T cell (Greek: ‘cyto’ is cell; ‘toxic’ is poison) so this equals a T cell that kills other cells that it sees as foreign to the body with poisons. Cytotoxic T cells express CD8 and can be recognized due to this expression (more on this later).

Gene editing is the use of various technologies to edit (remove in this case) specific genetic elements within a cell (or an organism, a topic for another day). Techniques of interest include those using elements of TALEN, CRISPR or ZFN gene-editing systems.

Allogeneic (Greek: ‘allo’ is other, ‘geneic’ is race) literally means a foreigner, of another race, and biologically means: “denoting, relating to, or involving tissues or cells that are genetically dissimilar and hence immunologically incompatible, although from individuals of the same species”.

So now we understand that what Cellectis is proposing is to genetically alter allogeneic CAR T cells so that, although they are foreign to the patient, they will not be recognized and eliminated. So, “off-the-shelf”, universal, CAR T cells, ready to use. But…

SECOND, to quote a friend of mine: What Problem Are We Solving? In other words, while all of these layers of technology that Cellectus is implementing sound very impressive and appealing, of what utility will they be? Do they address a fundamental and intractable issue in the CAR T field? Should we be excited? Perhaps.

We can step back and ask of the CAR T field: what problems does it have? There are several and they are well known.

1) CAR T cells must be highly selective for the target cancer to avoid unwanted killing of other cells, tissues, organs

2) CAR T cells must proliferate and persist once injected into the patient (i.e. in vivo)

3) Since most CAR T technologies are based on a personalized medicine approach – your cancer attacked by your engineered T cells – there is a fair amount of cell culture to do between harvesting your T cells, altering them (via retroviral or other cell transduction technique), expanding those altered T cells so there are enough to “take” upon injection back into the patient. All of this is expensive, with a typical guess at the price tag of 500K USD

4) CAR T therapy is dangerous (although a bit like Formula One racing – very dangerous and just barely controlled). The danger comes from the potential for off-tumor cell killing but also from tumor lysis syndrome, which happens when large numbers of tumor cells are suddenly killed – all sorts of cellular signals get released and this causes an intense and systemic physiological breakdown – very dangerous, but controllable in an appropriate intensive care unit (so recovery care is also very expensive)

5) CAR T therapy to date has had limited success outside of refractory acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL). Now, while refractory ALL is a poster child of an indication – intensely difficult to treat, with many pediatric patients – there are about 4000 such patients in the US each year. Commercially, this is limiting.

6) Cancer-specific targets suitable for CAR T technology are very rare.

OK, back to Cellectis, whose lead product targets … refractory ALL. So, what problem are they solving? According to company messaging – control over costs by eliminating the personalzed aspects of the therapy. But we’ve already noted that, right now, that is only one of the critical issues facing CAR T cell technology. That may be enough to grab a piece of the refractory ALL market (and some other indications), and drive valuation for a few years, but a sustainable business, hmmm. And that we see here is true of all of the CAR T cells targeting the refractory ALL antigen, CD19. Refractory ALL is not a big enough pie for everyone, nor are the niche indications lumped under the non-Hodgkin Lymphoma label, like Diffuse Large B cell lymphoma and Follicular Lymphoma. CAR T companies will get a portion of these patients, but that will not sustain an industry with a dozen big players. So Cellectis will need more. Of course Cellectis knows this and is looking well past this near term application.

What else happened last week? On the heals of it’s billion dollar 10 year deal with Celgene, JUNO announced the initiation of a CAR T clinical trial employing the impressive sounding “Armoured CAR”. While the term plays nicely to our adolescent/aggressive-minded car culture, what does it actually mean, and, again, what problem are they solving? The armoured CAR T cell is not so much armoured as it is accessorized, carrying a pro-inflammatory cytokine called IL-12 that it expresses as it circulates around the patient looking for tumor cells to kill. Once it finds the tumor, or tumor metastases, the CAR T cell does its usual work, secreting poisons (perforin, granzymes, cytokines, etc) but now, in addition, secreting IL-12, which can amplify the immune response to the tumor via its effects on nearby T and natural killer (NK) cells, including induction of IFN-gamma, enhancement of cell-mediated cytotoxicity and cell proliferation. This approach may work to unlock one of the biggest issues confronting CAR T cell companies – getting solid tumors (as opposed to the “liquid” leukemias and lymphomas) to respond to CAR T therapy at all. So far the results have been disappointing, possibly because the solid tumor microenvironment is so darn immunosuppressive. The JUNO trial is targeting the ovarian cancer antigen MUC16 and will be run at partner hospital, MSKCC. While MUC16 is strongly expressed in ovarian carcinoma (and also pancreatic cancer) the literature indicates normal expression on diverse epithelial cells, including in the lung, the lining of eye and elsewhere. For this reason, as well as the threat of tumor lysis syndrome, JUNO’s armoured CAR also has a off switch that can be activated in case of toxicity. So we are rolling the dice here. Why? Ovarian carcinoma is a large indication with enormous unmet medical need, and pancreatic equally so. Improving patient outcomes in these large and difficult indications would be very notable, and of course, very good business.

Lets look at some data on CAR antigens:

LIST OF SOME ANTIGENS FOR HEMATOLOGIC CANCERS

THIS SHORT LIST IS REFLECTED IN ONGOING COMPANY-SPONSORED CLINICAL TRIALS

ACADEMIC CENTERS ARE AHEAD OF THE CURVE, AS IS ALWAYS TRUE IN THIS FIELD

BUT EVEN HERE, LEUKEMIA AND LYMPHOMA TARGETS DOMINATE (CD19, CD20, CD30, KAPPA Ig, BCMA, ETC)

AS OF 2014, CD19 TRIALS DOMINATED CLINICAL WORK IN HEMATOLOGIC MALIGNANCIES

THE SOLID TUMOR ANTIGEN FIELD IS SIMILARLY CONSTRAINED

AND ANOTHER PAGE BELOW

ALTHOUGH THE DISTRIBUTION OF TRIALS/ANTIGEN IS MORE EVEN, THE NUMBER OF PROTOCOLS IS SMALL (AS OF DATE OF THE REFERENCED PUBLICATION)

So my hope is that we can engineer CAR T cells with sufficient machinery to “rescue” CAR T technology from the reality of an antigen-poor landscape. The technology is stunning, but I wonder if in the face of such challenges one ought not to look around, and perhaps take another approach. As it turns out, nearly all cellular therapy companies that have taken on the CAR T field have begun to diversify – we’ve been asking what problems we are solving with these clever twists on the basic technology – and this is well worth pursuing. However in the face of a limited pool of targets, lets perhaps consider a technology with a much much larger target list: tumor neoantigens as recognized by T Cell Receptors (TCR). TCR and TIL technologies offer some interesting solutions, and their own unique challenges…

stay tuned.

Some Adjacencies in Immuno-oncology

April 27, 20154-1BB, Aduro Biotech, Alligator Bioscience, Bellicum Pharmaceuticals, Biogen, BioNovion, Bristol Myers Squibb, cancer, CD27, CLDX, Coronado, CTLA4, Enumeral, Genentech, GITR, GITR Inc, HALO, Halozyme, immunology, immunotherapy, Innate Pharma, monoclonal antibodies, Novartis, oncology, OX40, PD-1, Pelican Therapeutics, Pfizer, Roche, Tekmira, TG Therapeutics, TNF receptors, tumor microenvironmentPaul Rennert

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Some thoughts to fill the space between AACR and ASCO (and the attendant frenzied biopharma/biotech IO deals).

Classical immune responses are composed of both innate and adaptive arms that coordinate to drive productive immunity, immunological expansion, persistence and resolution, and in some cases, immunological memory. The differences depend on the “quality” of the immune response, in the sense that the immunity is influenced by different cell types, cytokines, growth factors and other mediators, all of which utilize diverse intracellular signaling cascades to (usually) coordinate and control the immune response. Examples of dysregulated immune responses include autoimmunity, chronic inflammation, and ineffective immunity. The latter underlies the failure of the immune system to identify and destroy tumor cells.

Let’s look at an immune response as seen by an immunologist, in this case to a viral infection:

Of note are the wide variety of cell types involved, a requirement for MHC class I and II responses, the presence of antibodies, the potential role of the complement cascade, direct lysis by NK cells, and the potentially complex roles played by macrophages and other myeloid cells.

In the immune checkpoint field we have seen the impact of very specific signals on the ability of the T cell immune response to remain productive. Thus, the protein CTLA4 serves to blunt de novo responses to (in this case) tumor antigens, while the protein PD-1 serves to halt ongoing immune responses by restricting B cell expansion in the secondary lymphoid organs (spleen, lymph nodes and Peyer’s Patches) and by restricting T cell activity at the site of the immune response, thus, in the tumor itself. Approved and late stage drugs in the immune checkpoint space are those that target the CTLA4 and PD-1 pathways, as has been reviewed ad nauseum. Since CTLA4 and PD-1 block T cell-mediated immune responses at different stages it is not surprising that they have additive or synergistic activity when both are targeted. Immune checkpoint combinations have been extensively reviewed as well.

We’ll not review those subjects again today.

If we step back from those approved drugs and look at other pathways, it is helpful to look for hints that we can reset a productive immune response by reengaging the innate and adaptive immune systems, perhaps by targeting the diverse cell types and/or pathways alluded to above.

One source of productive intelligence comes from the immune checkpoint field itself, and its’ never-ending quest to uncover new pathways that control immune responses. Indeed, entire companies are built on the promise of yet to be appreciated signals that modify immunity: Compugen may be the best known of these. It is fair to say however that we remain unclear how best to use the portfolio of checkpoint modulators we already have in hand, so perhaps we can look for hints there to start.

New targets to sift through include the activating TNF receptor (TNFR) family proteins, notably 4-1BB, OX40, and GITR; also CD40, CD27, TNFRSF25, HVEM and others. As discussed in earlier posts this is a tricky field, and antibodies to these receptors have to be made just so, otherwise they will have the capacity to signal aberrantly either because the bind to the wrong epitope, or they mediate inappropriate Fc-receptor engagement (more on FcRs later). At Biogen we showed many years ago that “fiddling” with the properties of anti-TNFR antibodies can profoundly alter their activity, and using simplistic screens of “agonist” activity often led to drug development disaster. Other groups (Immunex, Amgen, Zymogenetics, etc) made very similar findings. Careful work is now being done in the labs of companies who have taken the time to learn such lessons, including Amgen and Roche/Genentech, but also BioNovion in Amsterdam (the step-child of Organon, the company the originally created pembrolizumab), Enumeral in Cambridge US, Pelican Therapeutics, and perhaps Celldex and GITR Inc (I’ve not studied their signaling data). Of note, GITR Inc has been quietly advancing it’s agonist anti-GITR antibody in Phase 1, having recently completed their 8th dose cohort without any signs of toxicity. Of course this won’t mean much unless they see efficacy, but that will come in the expansion cohort and in Phase 2 trials. GITR is a popular target, with a new program out of Wayne Marasco’s lab at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute licensed to Coronado and Tg Therapeutics. There are many more programs remaining in stealth for now.

More worrisome are some of the legacy antibodies that made it into the clinic at pharma companies, as the mechanisms of action of some of these agonist antibodies are perhaps less well understood. But lets for the sake of argument assume that a correctly made anti-TNFR agonist antibody panel is at hand, where would we start, and why? One obvious issue we confront is that the functions of many of these receptors overlap, while the kinetics of their expression may differ. So I’d start by creating a product profile, and work backward from there.

An ideal TNFR target would complement the immune checkpoint inhibitors, an anti-CTLA4 antibody or a PD-1 pathway antagonist, and also broaden the immune response, because, as stated above, the immune system has multiple arms and systems, and we want the most productive response to the tumor that we can generate. While cogent arguments can be made for all of the targets mentioned, at the moment 4-1BB stands as a clear frontrunner for our attention.

4-1BB is an activating receptor for not only T cells but also NK cells, and in this regard the target provides us with an opportunity to recruit NK cells to the immune response. Of note, it has been demonstrated by Ron Levy and Holbrook Khort at Stanford that engagement of activating Fc receptors on NK cells upregulates 4-1BB expression on those cells. This gives us a hint of how to productively combine antibody therapy with anti-4-1BB agonism. Stanford is already conducting such trials. Furthermore we can look to the adjacent field of CAR T therapeutics and find that CAR T constructs containing 4-1BB signaling motifs (that will engage the relevant signaling pathway) confer upon those CAR T cells persistence, longevity and T cell memory – that jewel in the crown of anti-tumor immunity that can promise a cure. 4-1BB-containing CAR T constructs developed at the University of Pennsylvania by Carl June and colleagues are the backbone of the Novartis CAR T platform. It is a stretch to claim that the artificial CAR T construct will predict similar activity for an appropriately engineered anti-4-1BB agonist antibody, but it is suggestive enough to give us some hope that we may see the innate immune system (via NK cells) and an adaptive memory immune response (via activated T cells) both engaged in controlling a tumor. Pfizer and Bristol Myers Squibb have the most advanced anti-4-1BB agonist antibody programs; we’ll see if these are indeed best-in-class therapeutics as other programs advance.

Agonism of OX40, GITR, CD27, TNFRSF25 and HVEM will also activate T cells, and some careful work has been done by Taylor Schreiber at Pelican to rank order the impact of these receptors of CD8+ T cell memory (the kind we want to attack tumors). In these studies TNFRSF25 clearly is critical to support CD8 T cell recall responses, and may provide yet another means of inducing immune memory in the tumor setting. Similar claims have been made for OX40 and CD27. Jedd Wolchok and colleagues recently reviewed the field for Clinical Cancer Research if you wish to read further.

Looking again beyond T cells another very intriguing candidate TNFR is CD40. This activating receptor is expressed on B cells, dendritic cells, macrophages and other cell types involved in immune responses – it’s ligand (CD40L) is normally expressed on activated T cells. Roche/Genentech and Pfizer have clinical stage agonist anti-CD40 programs in their immuno-oncology portfolios. Agonist anti-CD40 antibodies would be expected to activated macrophages and dendritic cells, thus increasing the expression of MHC molecules, costimulatory proteins (e.g. B7-1 and B7-2) and adhesion proteins like VCAM-1 and ICAM-1 that facilitate cell:cell interactions and promote robust immune responses.

I mentioned above that interaction of antibodies with Fc receptors modulates immune cell activity. In the case of anti-CD40 antibodies, Pfizer and Roche have made IgG2 isotype antibodies, meaning they will have only weak interaction with FcRs and will not activate the complement cascade. Thus all of the activity of the antibody should be mediated by it’s binding to CD40. Two other agonist anti-CD40 antibodies in development are weaker agonists, although it is unclear why this is so; much remains to be learned regarding the ideal epitope(s) to target and the best possible FcR engagement on human cells. Robert Vonderheide and Martin Glennie tackled this subject in a nice review in Clinical Cancer Research in 2013 and Ross Stewart from Medimmune did likewise for the Journal of ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, so I won’t go on about it here except to say that it has been hypothesized that crosslinking via FcgRIIb mediates agonist activity (in the mouse). Vonderheide has also shown that anti-CD40 antibodies can synergize with chemotherapy, likely due to the stimulation of macrophages and dendritic cells in the presence of tumor antigens. Synergy with anti-CTLA4 has been demonstrated in preclinical models.

One of the more interesting CD40 agonist antibodies recently developed comes from Alligator Biosciences of Lund, Sweden. This antibody, ADC-1013, is beautifully characterized in their published work and various posters, including selection for picomolar affinity and activity at the low pH characteristic of the tumor microenvironment (see work by Thomas Tötterman, Peter Ellmark and colleagues). In conversation the Alligator scientists have stated that the antibody signals canonically, i.e. through the expected NF-kB signaling cascade. That would be a physiologic signal and a good sign indeed that the antibody was selected appropriately. Not surprisingly, this company is in discussion with biopharma/biotech companies about partnering the program.

Given the impact of various antibody/FcR engagement on the activity of antibodies, it is worth a quick mention that Roghanian et al have just published a paper in Cancer Cell showing that antibodies designed to block the inhibitory FcR, FcgRIIB, enhance the activity of depleting antibodies such as rituximab. Thus we again highlight the importance of this sometimes overlooked feature of antibody activity. Here is their graphical abstract:

The idea is that engagement of the inhibitory FcR reduces the effectiveness of the (in this case) depleting antibody.

Ok, moving on.

Not all signaling has to be canonical to be effective, and in the case of CD40 we see this when we again turn to CAR T cells. Just to be clear, T cells do not normally express CD40, and so it is somewhat unusual to see a CAR T construct containing CD3 (that’s normal) but also CD40. We might guess that there is a novel patent strategy at work here by Bellicum, the company that is developing the CAR construct. The stated goal of having a CD40 intracellular domain is precisely to recruit NF-kB, as we just discussed for 4-1BB. Furthermore, the Bellicum CAR T construct contains a signaling domain from MYD88, and signaling molecule downstream of innate immune receptors such as the TLRs that signal via IRAK1 and IRAK4 to trigger downstream signaling via NF-kB and other pathways.

Here is Bellicum’s cartoon:

If we look through Bellicum’s presentations (see their website) we see that they claim increased T cell proliferation, cytokine secretion, persistence, and the development of long-term memory T cells. That’s a long detour around 4-1BB but appears very effective.

The impact of innate immune signaling via typical TLR-triggered cascades brings us to the world of pattern-recognition receptors, and an area of research explored extensively by use of TLR agonists in tumor therapy. Perhaps the most notable recent entrant in this field is the protein STING. This pathway of innate immune response led to adaptive T cell responses in a manner dependent on type I interferons, which are innate immune system cytokines. STING signals through IRF3 and TBK1, not MYD88, so it is a parallel innate response pathway. Much of the work has come out of a multi-lab effort at the University of Chicago and has stimulated great interest in a therapeutic that might be induce T cell priming and also engage innate immunity. STING agonists have been identified by the University of Chicago, Aduro Biotech, Tekmira and others; the Aduro program is already partnered with Novartis. They published very interesting data on a STING agonist formulated as a vaccine in Science Translational Medicine on April 15th (2 weeks ago). Let’s remember however that we spent several decades waiting for TLR agonists to become useful, so integration of these novel pathways may take a bit of time.

This emerging mass of data suggest that the best combinations will not necessarily be those that combine T cell immune checkpoints (anti-CTLA4 + anti-PD-1 + anti-XYZ) but rather those that combine modulators of distinct arms of the immune system. Recent moves by biopharma to secure various mediators of innate immunity (see Innate Pharma’s recent deals) and mediators of the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (see the IDO deals and the interest in Halozyme’s enzymatic approach) suggest that biopharma and biotech strategists are thinking along the same lines.

ICI15 presentation is now available

April 3, 20154-1BB, CD27, GITR, IDO, ipilimumab, News, nivolumab, oncology, OX40, PD-1, pembrolizumab, T regulatory cells, TGFbeta, TIGIT, TIM-3, TNF receptors, tumor microenvironmentPaul Rennert

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Over 100 slides on immune checkpoint combination therapy, novel targets and drug development in immuno-oncology, created for a 3 hour workshop at ICI15 (link).

As always we work from indications to discovery and back again, keeping one eye on the rapid evolution of clinical practice in oncology and the other on novel targets and therapeutics.

on SlideShare now:

The immune checkpoint landscape in 2015: combination therapy from Paul D. Rennert