Despite various existing drug delivery methods, the key challenge remains: how to deliver drugs to the desired site of therapeutic action to achieve best treatment outcome, while minimising side effects? This is even more challenging in cancer immunotherapy as a complex interplay of immune reactions need to be activated.
POLYMMUNE has evaluated the technical and commercial viability of our novel polymeric nanocarrier platform (developed during the ERC Consolidator grant MyNano) for targeted drug delivery of a wide variety of diseases and therapeutics. As proof of concept, we have focused on immunotherapy delivery for melanoma as our nanocarrier presented a clear lymphotropic character. Globally ~132,000 new melanoma cases will be diagnosed each year and despite recent successes, only 50% of the patients respond to novel immunotherapies that are costly, while causing severe side effects. By coupling commercially available antigens to our nanocarrier (including Melan-A, gp100) alone or in combination (providing with a multivalent vaccine) we have shown the activation of a broad immune response, resulting in an effective cancer vaccine that potentially could target different melanoma types as the effect is maintained even with different antigens, enabling off-the-shelf production and broad patient applicability. The multivalent vaccine showed the best anticancer performance. Our nanovaccine showed superiority to current treatment (PDL-1 antibody) when administered alone, but also could synergise with them to allow current standard of care for melanoma patients. Not only that, we have demonstrated safety at the therapeutic doses given and importantly, we have validated that the manufacture of the nanovaccine will be 5-10-fold cheaper than current treatments. We expect that this triple action will lead to increased clinical benefit.
To date, we are able to say that Polymmune can be considered a success story as the overall objective has been fully accomplished and not only that, additional information was able to be gathered with our platform technology within Polymmune frame. Important to note, our platform technology strongly protected by a EU and US granted patent has been licensed to the company PTS SL. PTS SL has already demonstrated that it is industrially scalable and thus overcome a major bottle neck of current nanocarrier-based medicine. Consequently, we envision our polypeptidic carriers to be used as a method of choice for drug delivery of cargos of different nature (small drugs, peptides, proteins or oligonucleotides) in many medical applications, such as cancer immunotherapy or neurodegenerative diseases. PTS SL is currently exploring this technology mainly in the areas of immunotherapy and gene delivery also in collaboration with other pharma companies in a risk sharing business model scheme. The polymer therapeutics lab at CIPF have a collaborative framework contract in place to contribute in the biological evaluation of this platform technology in different preclinical models. Finally, our polypeptidic platform offers a highly attractive business case, as biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies heavily invest in nanomedicine due to the need for novel drug delivery strategies in particular in two major areas immunotherapy and gene delivery. A full study of the market trends analysis and competitive landscape have also been performed which identifies unique selling points for Polymmune technology.
