Summary
Immunotherapy holds great promise for curative cancer treatment. While immune checkpoint inhibitors can induce complete and long-term cures, the percentage of patients responding to immunotherapy remains to be low. Combining immunotherapy with chemotherapeutic drugs that induce immunogenic cell death (ICD) is among the most promising strategies to potentiate antitumor immune responses. Chemotherapeutics are clinically typically administered via intravenous infusion, once every couple of weeks, at high doses. Metronomic dosing is based on the application of chemotherapy drugs at high frequency and low doses, and it is gaining increasing interest to potentiate chemo-immunotherapy responses. However, high-frequency low-dose chemotherapy administration in the clinic via intravenous infusion is pragmatically undoable and economically not feasible. At-home administration via oral ingestion or subcutaneous self-injection is impossible, because of the side effect spectrum of chemotherapeutic drugs. In the PRIME project, we aim to establish PRodrug technology for Immunotherapy-priming via patient-friendly at-home MEtronomic dosing. Prodrugs have assisted in improving drug performance for over a century now, and they are widely employed in pharmaceutical industry and clinical practice, with approximately 10% of new drug approvals technically being prodrugs. We will set out to establish a synthetic and formulation strategy to produce a novel immunogenic prodrug platform, and upon subcutaneous metronomic dosing, we will evaluate the preclinical performance of our prodrugs as monotherapy and in combination with immunotherapy in breast and prostate cancer mouse models. We anticipate that exploiting the technological and socio-economic potential of PRIME will unlock new avenues towards at-home cancer treatment opportunities with enhanced therapeutic outcomes and improved patient quality-of-life.
Unfold all
/
Fold all
More information & hyperlinks
| Web resources: | https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101138100 |
| Start date: | 01-10-2023 |
| End date: | 31-03-2025 |
| Total budget - Public funding: | - 150 000,00 Euro |
Cordis data
Original description
Immunotherapy holds great promise for curative cancer treatment. While immune checkpoint inhibitors can induce complete and long-term cures, the percentage of patients responding to immunotherapy remains to be low. Combining immunotherapy with chemotherapeutic drugs that induce immunogenic cell death (ICD) is among the most promising strategies to potentiate antitumor immune responses. Chemotherapeutics are clinically typically administered via intravenous infusion, once every couple of weeks, at high doses. Metronomic dosing is based on the application of chemotherapy drugs at high frequency and low doses, and it is gaining increasing interest to potentiate chemo-immunotherapy responses. However, high-frequency low-dose chemotherapy administration in the clinic via intravenous infusion is pragmatically undoable and economically not feasible. At-home administration via oral ingestion or subcutaneous self-injection is impossible, because of the side effect spectrum of chemotherapeutic drugs. In the PRIME project, we aim to establish PRodrug technology for Immunotherapy-priming via patient-friendly at-home MEtronomic dosing. Prodrugs have assisted in improving drug performance for over a century now, and they are widely employed in pharmaceutical industry and clinical practice, with approximately 10% of new drug approvals technically being prodrugs. We will set out to establish a synthetic and formulation strategy to produce a novel immunogenic prodrug platform, and upon subcutaneous metronomic dosing, we will evaluate the preclinical performance of our prodrugs as monotherapy and in combination with immunotherapy in breast and prostate cancer mouse models. We anticipate that exploiting the technological and socio-economic potential of PRIME will unlock new avenues towards at-home cancer treatment opportunities with enhanced therapeutic outcomes and improved patient quality-of-life.Status
SIGNEDCall topic
ERC-2023-POCUpdate Date
12-03-2024
Images
No images available.
Geographical location(s)
