Biopharma’s top brass forms bold new immunotherapy coalition
Biopharma’s top brass forms bold new immunotherapy coalition
coalition
By MEGHANA KESHAVAN
Post a comment / 49 Shares / Jan 11, 2016 at 11:00 AM
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[Story updated to reflect remarks from Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference]
We’re one step closer to open-source collaboration in the life sciences – and could come a hell of a lot closer to completely revolutionizing cancer treatment – thanks to a promising new alliance formed by the top brass in biopharma.
Meant to accelerate the potential of immunotherapy in treating cancer, The National Immunotherapy Coalition has just been launched by leaders from Amgen, Celgene, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and NantWorks – along with Independence Blue Cross and many others. Here’s why:
“We’ve had a 40-year illusion that cancer is a single clone, when it’s really a multiclonal disease,” Soon-Shiong said. “We have pursued cancer the wrong way for 40 years.”
Chemotherapy is too blunt a tool, he says. And while immunotherapy has emerged as a powerful tool to combat cancer, researchers have found that it can work most effectively when different therapeutics are used in tandem to attack different cancers.
However, immunotherapy makers have closely guarded their science – and it’s often left up to the doctors and independent researchers to see whether one monoclonal antibody drug interacts more powerfully in the presence of another. There’s still a significant level of guesswork.
“It’s not good enough to measure just 200 genomes,” Soon-Shiong said. “You need to measure 20,000 genomes… And its’ not good enough to measure the whole genome – you need to measure RNA, and the proteome.”
The Coalition will allow access to more than 60 novel and approved immunotherapy agents to “enable the rapid testing of novel immunotherapy combination protocols” – forming the basis for an ambitious new cancer initiative called “Cancer MoonShot 2020.”
The NIC says it’ll run a series of clinical trials in all stages of cancer patients in up to 20 tumor types. The NIC will design, initiate and complete a number of Phase 2 randomized clinical trials – called the QUILT program – in some 20,000 cancer patients with cancer at all stages of disease in up to 20 tumor types by 2020. Some of the cancer types under study will be breast, lung, prostate, ovarian, brain, head and neck, multiple myeloma, sarcoma and pancreatic cancer.
These QUILT trials are meant to “harness and orchestrate all elements of the immune system” – deploying dendritic, T cell and NK cell therapies. It’ll test novel combinations of vaccines, cell-based immunotherapy, metronomic chemotherapy, low-dose radiation therapy and immunomodulators – such as checkpoint inhibitors – in patients that have not only had next-gen sequencing of their whole genome, but also their trascriptome and proteome.
“At Celgene, we are fully committed to the Cancer MoonShot 2020 Program as a part of our longstanding efforts to discover and develop new therapies for difficult to treat cancers,” Celgene CEO Robert J. Hugin said in a statement.
He added that Celgene will apply its “deep and diverse library of important molecules, both approved and in the development pipeline,” to the QUILT clinical trials.
The early framework for MoonShot 2020 was birthed in collaboration with Vice President Joe Biden, Soon-Shiong said in his JPM presentation. He gathered a diverse group of stakeholders in Los Angeles on December 1 and held a four hour meeting with a number of biopharma players, insurers, Bank of America, the Food and Drug Administration, and academia.
As this decade comes to a close, we’re seeing massive headway in the war against cancer. For instance, Illumina just announced it has plans to launch a pan-cancer diagnostic that will seek out the disease in asymptomatic individuals by 2019.
More details on the Coalition and the Moonshot will be unveiled tomorrow at 2 p.m. PST at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference – so stay tuned.
[Image courtesy of Flickr user Mars DD]
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