CONAN

Need

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world, with an incidence of more than 18M new cases diagnosed in 2020, and almost 10M deaths attributed to this disease. The group has been developing the advanced medicine therapy program, CELYVIR, for more than one year,combination of oncolytic virus cell vehicle (tumor-selective replication virus) for cancer treatment.To date, the CELYVIR clinical evaluation program has completed 2 clinical trials and is being evaluated in 2 other trials in both adults and children. Clinical results have demonstrated an absence of toxicity or disease progression related to CELYVIR administration, accompanied by some objective antitumor responses that in some cases have consisted in a complete elimination of the disease.

Despite these promising results in clinical studies of CELYVIR, we have identified the short arrival of cells and virus to the tumor as the main limitation of the therapy. This is due to the limited time that the vehicle cells have to reach the tumor before the virus completes its cycle (48-72h). It is this problem that CONAN aims to address.

Solution

Development of a new system that allows to control at will when to activate the start of replication of the oncolytic virus of CELYVIR therapy. In this way, CELYVIR reaches the tumor, and once there, the replication of the virus is activated, increasing the concentration of the virus in the tumor mass and improving the anti-tumor capacity of the therapy.

The new system is based on two main modifications encompassed in the TetOn/TetOff expression system, one involving our oncolytic adenovirus and the other our cellular vehicle. Tetracycline administration is the key element that regulates the whole system. Thus, the clinical application of this new CELYVIR will consist of administering tetracycline to the patient only when the cellular product is considered to have accumulated in an optimal amount in the tumor. Finally, the invention allows that once the virus is released from the modified cells, it behaves as a normal replicative oncolytic adenovirus since the tumor cells do not incorporate the second modification affecting the cellular vehicle.

Objective

That the new advanced therapy to complement CELYVIR be available for all those cancer patients with relapse in those first 5 years and for whom there is currently no effective therapy.