Accelerating and expanding the therapeutic potential of ERAP1 inhibition in cancer

Grey Wolf Therapeutics is developing a next-generation approach to cancer immunotherapy that is more effective than existing treatments and can be applied to a much wider variety of cancers.

Breakthroughs in immunotherapy have been ground-breaking in the treatment of some cancers, with great benefits in some patients with advanced disease, in some cases extending and improving the life of patients by many years. However, most types of cancer are not controlled by these therapies, and therefore there remains a huge need to develop new medicines as cancer rates continue to grow. Recent research has shown that the visibility of a tumour to the immune system is one of the most important factors that decides whether it will progress and grow.

Tumours that show a high number of 'non-self' components at the cell surface called neoantigens are particularly sensitive to current immunotherapies because they are more visible and likely to be recognized by the immune system as 'foreign'. However, most cancers have low numbers of neoantigens on their surface and therefore immunotherapies are not very effective in these cases. The immune system simply doesn't recognise that the cells should be eliminated. The future of cancer therapy requires new medicines that can address the tumour visibility problem.

Grey Wolf has developed an innovate medicine that significantly alters the neoantigens presented on the cancer cell surface, illuminating them to the immune system, which is now able to recognise that the cells should be destroyed. This completely novel mode of action is active across the spectrum of cancer types and as such has the potential to provide huge benefits to thousands of cancer patients who currently have no effective treatment options available to them.