Novartis, Harvard, Dana-Farber Join Hands for Cancer Immunotherapy Development
Novartis is now teaming up with scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to develop biomaterial systems for second-generation cancer immunotherapies, the pharma giant and the Institute said.
Jay Bradner, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, noted that the researchers “have combined the fields of immuno-oncology and material science to develop novel platforms for delivering immunotherapies to combat cancer.”
The implantable and injectable systems are made of biodegradable materials that assemble into porous, three-dimensional structures. In lab experiments, the systems release cell-recruiting factors to attract host dendritic cells and present tumor antigens to those specialized immune cells, intending to bolster immune responses to cancer.
These systems have not yet been proven in human clinical trials but are seen to hold great promise because of their potential to serve as engineered microenvironments to educate the immune system about cancer and initiate immune responses against tumors over a sustained period of time.
Through many years’ work, researchers at Dana-Farber and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the Wyss Institute have engineered the biomaterial systems
with an aim to provide sustained delivery of immunotherapies and target specific types of cancer. Novartis will further collaborate with the team at the Wyss Institute to advance development of the biomaterial systems, investigating their use to deliver agents from its broad and deep portfolio of second-generation immunotherapies.“This effort has been a tremendous translation of biomedical engineering to cancer therapeutics. It allows an individualized approach to cancer vaccines as well as a novel method to manipulate what we know about the immune system to educate it against cancer,” said Stephen Hodi, MD, Director, Center for Immuno-Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Primary Investigator of the Phase 1 trial.
“Our collaborators have combined the fields of immuno-oncology and material science to develop novel platforms for delivering immunotherapies to combat cancer,” said Jay Bradner, President of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR). “We look forward to collaborating with the Wyss Institute to further develop this technology in conjunction with our growing immunotherapy portfolio.”
In 2013, the Wyss Institute and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) initiated a Phase I clinical trial at DFCI to test the safety of the first of these implantable, immuno-material-based cancer vaccines in patients with melanoma, a lethal form of skin cancer.
The trial followed extensive preclinical studies performed by a collaborative team headed by Mooney and Glenn Dranoff, M.D., who at the time was a Wyss Institute Associate Faculty member and co-leader of Dana Farber’s Cancer Vaccine Center.
The team demonstrated that the cancer vaccine could potentially shrink or eradicate multiple types of tumors, in addition to providing prophylactic protection, in various animal models. Dranoff is now Global Head of Exploratory Immuno-Oncology at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research.
“When we initiated this cancer vaccine program at the Wyss Institute, it was strike zone for what we wanted to pursue — a research project conceived by our visionary faculty that was high-risk and required a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary effort but had the potential to bring about a transformative advance in clinical care. Then, with the vision and collaborative support of another institutional member of the Wyss Institute consortium, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, we made the decision to co-fund a Phase I clinical trial inside academia, which was really pushing the envelope. Thus, this agreement is extremely exciting for us because it validates our innovation model, but even more importantly, it will bring an exciting new therapeutic modality into the clinic for patients with many different types of cancer,” said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at HMS and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS.
