Breast cancer is the most prominent cancer among women in the United States. Last year alone, there were 310,720 breast cancer diagnoses in America, with over 40,000 women succumbing to the disease.
Unfortunately, only about 32% of those diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer experience a five-year survival rate. And for those who do reach five years, the treatment process can be highly invasive, painful, and unfortunately, very expensive.
Currently, metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer is often treated with a combination of monoclonal antibodies such as trastuzumab or pertuzumab, and chemotherapy to slow the progression of the disease. While other HER2 inhibitors, in combination with chemotherapy, do show some promise, the response to these treatments is often limited.
This is why scientists are now trying to engineer immune cell-based cancer therapies, like chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies that have proven efficacy with blood cancers, for the treatment of solid tumors like breast cancer.
As noted in OncLive, “(CAR) T-cell therapy, which has revolutionized the treatment of certain hematologic malignancies, including specific types of leukemia and lymphoma, and has significantly improved response rates for these diseases. This personalized immunotherapy involves modifying a patient’s T cells, which are an integral part of the immune system, to recognize and attack cancer cells…
“CAR T-cell therapy for solid tumors… presents a set of new challenges due to tumor microenvironment and antigen heterogeneity.”
It is this set of challenges CytoMed Therapeutics (NASDAQ: GDTC) looks to overcome.
In early January, CytoMed entered a collaboration with SUNACT Cancer Institute in India to advance the use of its allogeneic gamma delta (γδ) T-cells in a Phase 2 clinical trial aimed at treating a basket of solid and blood cancers.
Of the collaboration, CytoMed’s Chairman Peter Choo said, “CytoMed’s collaboration with SUNACT is timely and complements our core focus of harnessing CytoMed’s proprietary off-the-shelf technologies to develop novel donor-derived cell-based allogeneic immunotherapies for the treatment of various cancers at affordable cost.
“We are aligned with the foresight of our partner SUNACT to provide affordable no-option cancer therapeutics that could improve patients’ quality of life.”
Should the trial prove successful, CytoMed Therapeutics looks to progress further in other clinical trials and aims to eventually offer a breakthrough product that may give new hope to solid tumor cancer patients, globally.
Read more about CytoMed’s CAR gamma delta T-cell therapies HERE
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