Project description
Immunotherapy administration via microneedles
Different routes of administration may be used to achieve either systemic or local delivery of therapeutic drugs. The intravenous route of administration bypasses the need for absorption and achieves 100 % bioavailability and rapid action. At the same time, systemic delivery is associated with adverse effects such as toxicity. The EU-funded Need2immune project is interested to improve the delivery of immunotherapeutic drugs against tumours. Researchers will employ microneedles traditionally used in vaccination strategies to deliver drugs via the intradermal or transdermal route. Advantages of such an approach include attaining higher drug concentration at desired sites, for example closer to tumours, and thus increased efficacy.
Objective
Cancer immunotherapy, defined as the ability to mobilise the host’s own immune system to kill cancer, has recently within the last 5 years, taken a central role within mainstream oncology. This period has seen the field rapidly accelerate towards unprecedented clinical responses in patients, and the development of novel classes of immunotherapeutic drugs. One approach has been to design more personalised immunotherapies along with new methods in delivering the therapeutic cargo. It is anticipated that this will play a defining role for cancer immunotherapy in terms of how to better achieve sustained remissions or complete eradication. One of the challenges in the future will be to understand how to administer these molecules since the current approach of systemic administration harbours the risk of causing serious toxicity and/or autoimmunity. This could drastically lower the serum levels of immune reagents needed with a decrease in adverse effects and lower risk of autoimmune reactions, without losing systemic efficacy. Currently, cancer immunotherapies are injected into the bloodstream but systemic injections have many drawbacks. It could be more effective therefore to inject this kind of therapy locally and directly to target tumour cells. This proposal will be to implement a more direct approach, where the immunotherapy's effects could be more easily controlled, with also the possibility for lower doses to be administered. Recently, microneedles have been attracting attention as new drug delivery tools. The microneedle has already been shown to be a highly effective intradermal and transdermal vaccine delivery method due to its mechanism of action, painlessness and ease of use. The goal is therefore to use microneedles to deliver localised doses of combination immunotherapies, e.g. vaccine with checkpoint modulators, in nanoparticles, as the focus of a novel approach to developing new strategies for the trackable delivery of onco-immunotherapeutic agents.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-SE - Society and Enterprise panelCoordinator
53359 Rheinbach
Germany
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.