PRodrug technology for Immunotherapy-priming via patient-friendly at-home MEtronomic dosing

Introduction

Immunotherapy holds great promise for curative cancer treatment. While immune checkpoint inhibitors can induce complete and long-term cures, the percentage of patients responding to immunotherapy remains low.

Combining Therapies

Combining immunotherapy with chemotherapeutic drugs that induce immunogenic cell death (ICD) is among the most promising strategies to potentiate antitumor immune responses.

Current Administration Methods

Chemotherapeutics are clinically typically administered via intravenous infusion, once every couple of weeks, at high doses.

Metronomic Dosing

Metronomic dosing is based on the application of chemotherapy drugs at high frequency and low doses, and it is gaining increasing interest to potentiate chemo-immunotherapy responses. However, high-frequency low-dose chemotherapy administration in the clinic via intravenous infusion is pragmatically undoable and economically not feasible.

Challenges of At-Home Administration

At-home administration via oral ingestion or subcutaneous self-injection is impossible because of the side effect spectrum of chemotherapeutic drugs.

PRIME Project Overview

In the PRIME project, we aim to establish PRodrug technology for Immunotherapy-priming via patient-friendly at-home MEtronomic dosing. Prodrugs have assisted in improving drug performance for over a century now, and they are widely employed in the pharmaceutical industry and clinical practice, with approximately 10% of new drug approvals technically being prodrugs.

Research Goals

We will set out to establish a synthetic and formulation strategy to produce a novel immunogenic prodrug platform. Upon subcutaneous metronomic dosing, we will evaluate the preclinical performance of our prodrugs as monotherapy and in combination with immunotherapy in breast and prostate cancer mouse models.

Anticipated Outcomes

We anticipate that exploiting the technological and socio-economic potential of PRIME will unlock new avenues towards at-home cancer treatment opportunities with enhanced therapeutic outcomes and improved patient quality of life.