Description du projet
Administration d’immunothérapie par micro-aiguilles
Différentes voies peuvent être utilisées pour assurer l’administration systémique ou locale de médicaments thérapeutiques. La voie d’administration intraveineuse permet de contourner le besoin d’absorption et permet une biodisponibilité totale et une action rapide. En revanche, l’administration systémique est associée à des effets indésirables tels que la toxicité. Le projet Need2immune, financé par l’UE, entend améliorer l’administration de médicaments immunothérapeutiques contre les tumeurs. Les chercheurs utiliseront des micro-aiguilles traditionnellement utilisées dans les stratégies de vaccination pour administrer des médicaments par voie intradermique ou transdermique. Une telle approche présente l’avantage d’atteindre une concentration plus élevée de médicaments sur les sites souhaités, par exemple plus près des tumeurs, ce qui en augmente l’efficacité.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF-EF-SE - Society and Enterprise panelCoordinateur
53359 Rheinbach
Allemagne
L’entreprise s’est définie comme une PME (petite et moyenne entreprise) au moment de la signature de la convention de subvention.