Hi all
Thanks to
@KTrade and others who posted references to Yuman's tweet and the article.
Yes - I agree with
@Gossy29 here. The article in the BMJ referenced in Yuman's tweet is about new/recent testing of CF33 for a new application. The full text is available at:
https://jitc.bmj.com/content/jitc/11/4/e006280.full.pdfThe previous animal testing - and the current Human trials - are for IV and intra-tumoural against a range of solid cancers. The intra-tumoural is direct injection into the tumour. The IV is administration into the bloodstream to see if Vaccinia can find cancer wherever it might be in the body. Yuman has told us that these trials are progressing extremely well and showing very positive results. We are awaiting publication of the results to see just how positive they are, and we are all hoping it will be headlline making stuff.
Meanwhile, Yuman and his team just keep coming up with more ideas. They clearly have huge expectations for CF33....
This latest testing in mice is to see if CF33/Vaccinia can help with gastric cancers which have metastasised (spread to other areas) widely through the peritoneal (abdominal) cavity - the space which holds our major organs - intestines, stomach, liver, kidney etc. ie the gastric cancer ha escaped the gastric tract and is spreading through the peritoneal cavity - attacking other organs. (Useful background article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41572-021-00326-6 )
This kind of cancer is incredibly serious and it is usually fatal. Just finding metastatic cancer is hard - it could be anywhere - and the peritoneal cavity is partly sealed off from the rest of the body by the cavity lining (the peritoneum). Chemotherapy administered into the bloodstream cannot effectively reach metastatic tumours growing on the outside of organs in the peritoneal cavity. IV administered CF33 (and also IV immunotherapy drugs) would have the same problem.
In recent years the treatment has been highly invasive surgery - opening up the abdominal cavity and rummaging around amongst all the organs there to find tumours and cut out the ones that can be operated on. The follow up is to pump litres of a heated chemotherapy solution into the abdominal cavity, swill it around and then suck it out again.
All very unpleasant and unlikely to actually save your life.
So Yuman and friends are now trying CF33 administered directly into the peritoneal cavity. This is very different to the current Phase 1 trial of IV and intratumoural injection. In this new animal trial they were targeting a particularly hard to treat situation - which is generally fatal.
So how did they do? Well, they seem to have done extremely well: "At day 91, seven out of eight mice were alive in the virus-treated group versus one out of eight in the control group."
The significance for Imugene:
- CF33 yet again shows very high safety and enormous effectiveness in pre-clinical (mouse) trials.
- Metastatic cancer in the peritoneal cavity is terribly hard to treat and the outcomes with existing treatments are very poor.
- The trial of CF33 in mice indicates that CF33 could be extremely effective for this hard to treat situation. The results were highly positive, "At day 91, seven out of eight mice were alive in the virus-treated group versus one out of eight in the control group."
- Note that this is still at very low dose levels - 3 doses at 10 to fifth. Just as with the original mouse trials, CF33 works at low dose levels - 100,000 PFU - and we know from the earlier trials that toxicity was not observed until they went to 1,000,000,000 PFU.
- This is a significant expansion of how CF33 can be used. Based on the mouse model results, I'm sure they will be very keen indeed to try this in humans. The current Phase 1 trials will set a likely therapeutic dose level.
For me this is further proof that CF33 could prove to be a remarkably effective treatment for a quite extraordinarily wide range of cancer type, stages and locations.
And that's quite an Easter egg!!!
Cheers
Dave
(20min delay)