Engineering a new versican remodeling recombinant bacterial product to enable immunotherapy success in triple negative breast cancer

The cancer therapeutics field has been revolutionized by immunotherapy. The development of drugs that recruit the immune system to recognize and eliminate cancer cells has led to an extraordinary increase in patient survival, in some tumour types. However, only around 20% of patients with solid tumours are estimated to currently benefit from them. Multiple factors contribute to this low level of efficacy. Chief among them is the existence of biophysical barriers that prevent the infiltration of immune cells in a subset of patients. Previous studies have shown that removing these barriers can increase immune infiltration. However, this approach has not worked in the clinic, due to either insufficient penetration of the tumour core by these drugs leading to poor efficacy, or toxicities associated with systemic drug delivery.

Neobe Therapeutics is a start up developing innovative live biotherapeutic products to disrupt these barriers from within. By acting locally within the tumour, these products will effectively increase immune infiltration while avoiding associated toxicities. Our products are designed to be delivered systemically and engineered to colonize the tumour core, respond to its local environment and remodel it from within, circumventing previous constraints. In this project we will develop a new bacterial product targeting a specific component of the tumour microenvironment associated with decreased immune infiltration in patients with triple negative breast cancer. The product is being designed based on data from the laboratory of Dr. Oliver Pearce at Queen Mary University of London, a collaborator on this project. We will engineer multiple prototypes and select the most effective one using state of the art cancer models. Our prototype will be a lead asset of a new class of live therapeutic products that alter the local environment of solid tumours from within, leading to the generation of a platform for future drug development upon project completion. More importantly, successful development and eventual commercialization of this project could expand the benefits of immunotherapies to thousands of patients with triple negative breast cancer.

The project is led by Neobe Therapeutics, founded by scientists with years of experience in this field, in both academic and industry settings. Neobe was spun out from a collaboration between Cancer Research UK and Deep Science Ventures, who will continue to be associated with this project to ensure its success. Our collaboration with Queen Mary will provide the necessary expertise on barriers to immune infiltration to guarantee product efficacy.