Oncology

A New Approach To Cancer

Background

The word “cancer” is used to describe a group of more than 100 distinct diseases, all of which are caused by abnormal cells growing out of control. Generally, cancer cells proliferate until they form a mass of abnormal cells, called a tumor. Hematopoietic malignancies, like leukemia, spread throughout the blood rather than forming tumors. Importantly, cancer cells often travel to parts of the body independent of where the cancer originated and quickly grow and form new tumors, called metastases. Cancers can spread to many organs; however, they’re named for the organ or tissue from where the cancer originated.

While many cancer types are similar in many ways, they’re also different in many ways, as well. Some cancer types are much more prone to metastases than others and may grow at significantly different rates. Thus, cancer treatments are generally aimed at the particular kind of cancer with which the patient is afflicted.

In the past decade, new treatment options called cancer immunotherapy, have become increasingly desirable. Cancer immunotherapies work by stimulating or directing the immune system of the patient to more effectively eradicate the cancer cells. One particularly promising type of cancer immunotherapy is that of the therapeutic cancer vaccine.

Therapeutic cancer vaccines are different from the vaccines most people are accustomed to, which are typically prophylactic treatments for viruses such as influenza. Therapeutic cancer vaccines use components of cancer cells to increase the immune response of the body against the cancer cells attacking the body. While these treatments are generally very effective at guiding the immune system to attack a particular cell type, they are often poorly-effective at stimulating the immune system to attack the cells enough to treat the disease. The component of the vaccine required to stimulate the immune system to attack the cancer cells is called the vaccine adjuvant.

Products in Development

NAS911 is unique among vaccine adjuvants in its ability to enhance all three arms of the immune system; cellular, humoral and innate. NAS911 has been seen to be a novel in vitro and in vivo dendritic cell (DC) stimulant. The enhanced longevity of DCs signaled via the neurokinin-1-receptor (NK1R) with NAS911 and CD40 resulted in sustained cellular immunity mediated mainly by T cells and macrophages. Dendritic cells cultured with NAS911 showed increased survival when adoptively transferred into syngeneic mice. This rescue from cell death was mediated through activation of the NK1R expressed on DCs. New Amsterdam Sciences is confident that these increased numbers of DCs as well as their enhanced survival is responsible for a truly efficacious immune response against cancer.

New Amsterdam Sciences is developing a novel vaccine adjuvant, which works to both stimulate and direct the body’s immune system to both prevent against, and to fight a cancer that has already developed to the point of a tumor. To date, NAS has observed efficacy in several different models of the highly-malignant skin cancer, melanoma. These studies indicate NAS911 is able to prevent the growth of metastatic melanoma, via modulating the immune system of the host to attack the cancerous cells more effectively. NAS has explored multiple different cancer vaccine types with industry and academic partners, finding similar efficacy in each of these models at either preventing or eradicating cancer cells.

For additional information on the products being developed for this indication, please contact us.