Project description
At-home prodrug cancer therapy
Chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs are conventionally administered in high doses at specific intervals. To avoid the associated side effects, metronomic dosing of lower, more frequent doses over an extended period has been proposed. Funded by the European Research Council, the PRIME project aims to develop an at-home metronomic dosing approach using prodrugs that are converted into an active drug within the body through metabolic or chemical processes. Prodrugs offer certain advantages over conventional drugs, including enhanced delivery, solubility and reduced toxicity. PRIME aims to revolutionise cancer treatment, improving outcomes and patient quality of life with at-home therapy.
Objective
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 to be low. Combining immunotherapy with chemotherapeutic drugs that induce immunogenic cell death (ICD) is among the most promising strategies to potentiate antitumor immune responses. Chemotherapeutics are clinically typically administered via intravenous infusion, once every couple of weeks, at high doses. 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. At-home administration via oral ingestion or subcutaneous self-injection is impossible, because of the side effect spectrum of chemotherapeutic drugs. 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 pharmaceutical industry and clinical practice, with approximately 10% of new drug approvals technically being prodrugs. We will set out to establish a synthetic and formulation strategy to produce a novel immunogenic prodrug platform, and 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. 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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine oncology
- medical and health sciences basic medicine immunology immunotherapy
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC-POC - HORIZON ERC Proof of Concept Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-POC
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
52074 Aachen
Germany
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.