Sherbrooke, Que.-based medtech startup Tatum Bioscience has demonstrated promising results for its immunotherapy that it claims can scale more reliably than other cancer vaccines.
“Replicating these results in patients is our goal as we move toward clinical development.”
Kevin Neil, Tatum Bioscience
In a paper published in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer this week, results in cancer-afflicted mice showed that Tatum’s immunotherapy, delivered through a vaccine-like agent, “uncloaked” cancer cells that were previously hidden from the immune system. This allowed the body to mount a defensive response that targeted and eliminated tumours.
“The immune system can be compared to an orchestra: for a powerful antitumor response, each instrument—or cellular component—must play its part at the right moment,” Tatum CEO and co-founder Jean-François Millau said in a statement. “That’s what our drug candidate…achieves.”
Treatment with Tatum’s drug eliminated the cancerous tumours in a majority of the mice. These potentially “cured” mice were kept under observation to see if the cancer would return. The researchers injected the mice with another round of cancerous cells, but none of them developed tumours, suggesting that they may have acquired immune protection against the specific cancer.
Dr. Gerald Batist, Tatum’s medical advisor and director of Montréal’s Segal Cancer Centre at the Jewish General Hospital, called the results “a major step forward” because the treatment activates both innate and adaptive immune responses. This means it carries the potential to protect against future development of a specific cancer, acting like a vaccine.
Founded in 2019 by Université de Sherbrooke researchers, Tatum develops immunotherapy drugs to treat cancers. These types of drugs are designed to activate the body’s immune system to destroy malignant tumours. This is different from treatments like chemotherapy, which target and eliminate problematic cells, but can kill healthy ones, too.
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