Grant: Project Grant

Cancer immunotherapy uses a patient's immune system to fight cancer. Unfortunately, until recently, most cancer immunotherapies did not work for most patients, or caused severe side effects, and almost all failed. The dream of a successful cancer immunotherapy treatment only came to life in the last few years. This breakthrough approach targets a recently discovered way to jump-start the immune system, using immune checkpoints' inhibitors. The discovery of these immune checkpoints pathways was recognized by a Nobel Prize in 2018. Drugs targeting these pathways activate a patient's immune system and allow it to recognize and kill tumors. They are game-changers for cancer. For example, combining two of them helped 88% of metastatic melanoma patients to live for two years. Traditional treatment results only in 10% of patients with this disease to live for two years. Current available drugs targeting the immune checkpoints are limited to monoclonal antibodies. While yielding impressive clinical response rates, they still have many limitations. For example, they require intravenous route of administration and stay active for weeks in the body, making side effects hard to control. They are also very expensive, making them inaccessible to many cancer patients. Our proposal seeks to develop an alternative therapy to these antibodies. Our alternative therapy is a small molecule immune checkpoint inhibitor. Once developed, our treatment can be much cheaper to manufacture, can be taken orally, taken each day and is only active for a short time (less than one day) in the body. This allows precise dose adjustments, which should reduce serious side effects of current immune checkpoints' antibody-based therapies.