Project description
Cancer treatment improved with targeted immunotherapy
Cancer claims millions of lives each year. Despite advancements, current treatments like surgery, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy still fall short of their therapeutic potential. While photomedical approaches such as photodynamic therapy (PDT) and photochemical internalisation (PCI) show promise, they are limited by the persistence of cancer cells that survive initial treatment and cause recurrence. The EU-funded SCALPEL project aims to overcome this challenge by using PDT or PCI to eliminate the bulk of the tumour, while marking the remaining damaged cancer cells for immune system destruction. By attaching antibodies to these cells, SCALPEL triggers targeted immune responses, potentially offering a revolutionary, curative approach to cancer treatment. The long-term goal is to advance SCALPEL to clinical use.
Objective
Cancer ranks as a major cause of death, with 3.4 million new incidences in 2020 in Europe. The current cancer standards of care include surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and, as of late, immunotherapy, none of which have met their expected therapeutic outcome yet. Photomedical treatments like photodynamic therapy of cancer (PDT) and Photochemical Internalisation (PCI) show great promise as effective anticancer treatments. Both are, however, limited by the cancer cells left behind, causing cancer recurrence and metastasis, after recovering from their sublethal membrane injuries.
But what, if we could label these injured cancer cells with antibodies, thus activating the immune system to eradicate them? SCALPEL will utilize PDT or PCI to destroy the bulk of tumour cells while marking the remaining sub-lethally damaged cancer cells for destruction, by attaching antibodies to their membranes. Bespoke, modified SCALPEL components will be administered to all cells, normal and cancerous. Following local irradiation, only the photo-modified components will conjugate with our specially engineered antibodies, selectively flagging the cancer cells, for destruction. Moreover, the immune system will be trained through this process, against the specific cancers offering systemic immunity.
The high risk/high gain nature of SCALPEL is counterbalanced by an avant-garde, multidisciplinary research team, covering photomedicine/photobiology, immunology, synthetic chemistry, porphyrin chemistry and protein engineering. SCALPEL is expected to revolutionize oncology by offering a pioneering photoimmunotherapy with curative potential. In this project, we strive to provide a proof-of-principle of the proposed technology in cell cultures, but also in laboratory animals, with the long term-vision of establishing SCALPEL as a clinical cancer modality.
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 surgery
- natural sciences biological sciences biochemistry biomolecules proteins
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
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.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC)
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-EIC-2024-PATHFINDEROPEN-01
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0450 Oslo
Norway
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