BIO 2025: Targeting the Microenvironment to Treat Solid Tumors
Ahead of BIO 2025, The Pharma Navigator gets to grips with solid tumors and finds out about a new approach that targets the tumor microenvironment with Oury Chetboun from Seekyo Therapeutics.
Solid tumors represent a vast majority of adult cancer cases and with factors, such as age and obesity increasing, this trend will continue into the future, highlights Oury Chetboun, CEO and Co-Founder, Seekyo Therapeutics — a pre-clinical stage biotechnology company. In fact, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, has projected that there will be 35 million cases by 2050 (1), which will have a significant impact on global healthcare systems and will also be burdensome on global economies, he specifies.
When approaching the treatment of solid tumors, there are certain challenges that need to be considered. “One such challenge is around the tumor heterogeneity,” Chetboun remarks. “So, we always think that if you are a single patient with a single type of solid tumor, you should have the same type of cells, but, in fact, there are genetic modifications, molecular diversity, not only between patients but also within the same single tumor.”
In addition to heterogeneity, the tumor microenvironment creates another challenge to treatment of solid tumors, Chetboun continues. “The tumor microenvironment is a very immunosuppressive type of environment and typically hostile to every kind of immune cells because there’s a low level of oxygen, what we call hypoxia, the pH is acidic, and there are a lot of immunosuppressive factors,” he says. These immunosuppressive factors negatively impact the effectiveness of therapies, such as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR T-cell) therapies, within solid tumors, Chetboun specifies.
Other challenges to treatment include, the fact that a solid tumor is a mass, a physical barrier, it makes penetration into the tumor through the density of the extracellular structure difficult; the abnormal vascularity of solid tumors makes drug delivery difficult; variability within antigens on the surface of the tumor cells which makes targeting delivery complex; and drug resistance, which builds up and leads to a need for new strategies and/or combination approaches, Chetboun explains.
Seeking to overcome the challenges associated with the treatment of solid tumors, Seekyo Therapeutics looked at targeting functional proteins that are found in the tumor microenvironment. “We felt that these functional proteins, which are specific enzymes expressed at high concentrations in the tumor microenvironment of all solid cancers could be leveraged,” Chetboun asserts. “So, what we have done at Seekyo is really target those functional proteins in order to activate our drug delivery system.”
Click the video above to view the full interview
Reference
WHO. Global Cancer Burden Growing, Amidst Mounting Need for Services. WHO.int, Feb. 1, 2024.
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/richard-smithson/air
License code: QHDAN9DIKVMQW8EK
Photo by Will Porada on Unsplash