The University of California, Irvine has licensed a new cancer-fighting immunotherapy to biotech firm GlyTR Therapeutics Inc. for commercialization, paving the way for what researchers call a potential “holy grail” treatment of multiple cancers.
The new immunotherapy discovery is a breakthrough, as there is currently no single pan-cancer therapy, according to UCI. It has the potential to target and destroy several major cancer types, including breast, colon, lung and prostate, university officials said.
“It’s the holy grail—one treatment to kill virtually all cancers,” UCI neuroscientist Dr. Michael Demetriou said.
GlyTR Therapeutics is an early-stage biotech company developing a novel immunotherapy platform technology that targets highly diverse cancer types, ranging from breast cancer to leukemia. It was created based on research from UCI.
For the last decade, Demetriou—co-founder of GlyTR Therapeutics along with Dr. Raymond Zhou—and his lab have been developing an immunotherapy with Velcro-like properties that bind to a complex sugar chain present in 90% of cancers, while leaving healthy tissue unharmed. It also targets solid tumors more effectively than current treatments.
“This will allow us to target many cancers, but also do it more safely than anybody else,” Demetriou told the Business Journal.
Funding and Trials
Demetriou’s research has received about $30 million to date, with the most recent funding being a $4.6 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, announced in February.
The 30-month grant will support the work needed to bring the immunotherapy to clinical trials, which will be conducted between the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and UCI Alpha Clinic, the clinical trial arm of the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center.
Trials are expected to begin within two years, according to Demetriou.
The Velcro Analogy
Conventional immunotherapies like Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, which uses a patient’s own immune system to kill cancer, have been effective in liquid cancers such as lymphoma and multiple myeloma, but not solid tumors, according to Demetriou.
“People have tried to go after solid cancers—breast, pancreatic, etc.—it’s not been successful,” he said.
Due to the diversity of tumor cells, it’s difficult for CAR T-cell therapies to identify the right antigen to target. Another issue is that solid cancers develop an immunosuppressive environment that protects them against therapy.
Demetriou and his team realized there’s a more prevalent target in complex sugar chains called glycans, found on the surface of all major cancer cell types. They genetically modified CAR T cells to attack these glycans, calling it a glycan-dependent T cell recruiter, or GlyTR (pronounced “glitter”).
He explained that the concept works like Velcro—where the glycan serves as the fuzzy side, while the GlyTR protein acts as the rough side. Because normal cells have very little glycan, the immunotherapy ignores healthy tissue and doesn’t attach to it.
By contrast, current CAR T cells attack cells with both high- and low-density expression.
One of the biggest challenges in developing the treatment, Demetriou said, was creating a suitable mouse model. Since the therapy only interacts with human immune cells, his team had to engineer special mice containing human T cells.
A second version of the immunotherapy, dubbed GlyTR 2, received funding from Cancer Moonshot, a White House initiative from the former Obama administration aimed at accelerating cancer research.
The primary difference is that the sugar chains they attack are different; however, they’re co-expressed and common to tumors, according to Demetriou.
“The plan in the future is look at combination therapy,” he said.
GlyTR 2 is currently being studied at the National Cancer Institute’s Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) Program to enable its use in human clinical trials that could start as early as the end of this year.
Other cancer centers say human trials will be the true test of the immunotherapy’s capabilities.
“While it’s encouraging to see new approaches under investigation, the ultimate measure of significance will be to see how such therapies perform in clinical settings,” Dr. Edward Kim, physician-in-chief at City of Hope Orange County, told the Business Journal.
“As leaders in immunotherapy research and clinical trial development, we look forward to seeing how this performs in real-world settings and contributes to the broader landscape of precision oncology.”
