Objective
PRECIOUS aims at scaling-up biodegradable nanomedicines for multimodal precision cancer immunotherapy.
With 3.5 million cancer patients in Europe every year, new cancer medicines are eagerly awaited, notably for prostate and ovarian cancer.
Systemically applied new immunotherapies are promising, but their toxicity is a hurdle. Vaccination against cancer is safe but rather the efficacy can be disappointing, i.e. the microenvironment shuts down anti-tumour immunity.
PRECIOUS will tackle 2 bottlenecks:
1. Production of non toxic multimodal nanomedicines, which induce vigorous immune responses, and at the same time reverse immunosuppression
2. Large scale GMP production of nanomedicines, and initiate a multimodal immunotherapy Phase I trial.
We want to solve these bottlenecks by:
Objective 1: Two types of GMP biodegradable nanoparticles: 1) a nanovaccine, containing tumour antigens and immune activators, and 2) a nanoparticle composed of compounds, which reverses the suppression and reactivates immunity in the tumour.
Objective 2: Clinical Phase I trial to show efficacy. Nanomedicines will be used by 1) injection of vaccines to evoke immune responses and 2) injection of nanoparticles in the tumour microenvironment, which slowly release compounds that reverse suppression.
To achieve this, a platform is formed with 6 leading industrial partners to produce large scale GMP nanomedicines and an excellent immunomodulator track record, together with 5 renowned academic partners to perform clinical studies.
Relevance to call: Large scale GMP production, industrial leadership, nanotechnology and advanced manufacturing KET technologies, translation to the clinic, marketing development.
Fields of science
- medical and health sciencesmedical biotechnologynanomedicine
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugsvaccines
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncology
- engineering and technologynanotechnologynano-materials
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunologyimmunotherapy
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
6525 GA Nijmegen
Netherlands