Publications by authors named "Victor Cervera-Carrascon"

Elevated levels of immune infiltration found in renal cell carcinoma are often associated with poor patient prognosis, likely due to T cell exhaustion and an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, which limits the efficacy of current immunotherapies. In this study, we focused on the use of Ad5/3-E2F-d24-hIL7 (TILT-517), an oncolytic adenovirus expressing interleukin-7, as a strategy to selectively lyse tumors. This approach also seeks to activate infiltrating immune cells, thereby reprogramming the immune landscape characteristic of renal cell carcinoma tumors.

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Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a cancer with dismal prognosis due to resistance to most current therapies. Although immunotherapy has improved the treatment of many solid cancers, pancreatic cancer remains resistant to immunotherapy due to immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, limited lymphocyte infiltration and lack of neoantigens. Oncolytic adenoviruses are a possible solution to treatment resistance in PDAC due to their ability to elicit lymphocyte trafficking and epitope spreading.

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Oncolytic adenovirus Ad5/3-E2F-d24-hTNFa-IRES-hIL2 (TILT-123, igrelimogene litadenorepvec) shows promise as a therapeutic agent capable of causing tumor regression and activating host immunity. A phase I clinical study TUNIMO (NCT04695327) assessed its safety as monotherapy in patients with various solid tumors. Through single-cell profiling of peripheral blood, we identified distinct immunological features distinguishing responders from non-responders.

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Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) are effective in the treatment of metastatic melanoma (MM), but toxicity limits its application. TILT-123 (igrelimogene litadenorepvec) is an oncolytic adenovirus producing interleukin-2 (IL-2) and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) upon replication. In this phase 1 trial, 17 patients with metastatic checkpoint inhibitor-resistant melanoma are treated with TILT-123 and TILs without preconditioning chemotherapy or postconditioning IL-2.

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Immune checkpoint inhibitors have demonstrated modest efficacy as a monotherapy in ovarian cancer. Originally developed to improve efficacy of T-cell therapies such as immune checkpoint inhibitors and adoptive cell transfer, TILT-123 (Ad5/3-E2F-D24-hTNFα-IRES-hIL-2) is a serotype chimeric oncolytic adenovirus encoding tumor necrosis factor alpha and interleukin-2. Here we report results from phase 1a of PROTA, a single-arm, multicentre dose escalation trial with TILT-123 and pembrolizumab in female patients with platinum resistant or refractory ovarian cancer (NCT05271318).

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Article Synopsis
  • TILT-123, an oncolytic virus engineered to enhance T-cell responses, was tested in the TUNIMO trial on 20 patients with advanced solid tumors to evaluate its safety, efficacy, and immunological effects.
  • The study found that a greater decrease in blood lymphocyte count after treatment was associated with better tumor response and longer overall survival, which was corroborated by an external dataset of 96 patients.
  • Analysis of tumor biopsies revealed an increase in immune cells, specifically CD8+ T cells, CD4+ T cells, and NK cells, suggesting that TILT-123 activates the immune response effectively in patients.
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T cell-focused cancer immunotherapy including checkpoint inhibitors and cell therapies has been rapidly evolving over the past decade. Nevertheless, there remains a major unmet medical need in oncology generally and immuno-oncology specifically. We have constructed an oncolytic adenovirus, Ad5/3-E2F-d24-aMUC1aCD3-IL-2 (TILT-322), which is armed with a human aMUC1aCD3 T cell engager and IL-2.

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Purpose: TILT-123 (igrelimogene litadenorepvec) is an oncolytic adenovirus armed with TNFa and IL2, designed to induce T-cell infiltration and cytotoxicity in solid tumors.

Patients And Methods: TUNIMO (NCT04695327) was a single-arm, multicenter phase I dose-escalation trial designed to assess the safety of TILT-123 in advanced solid cancers refractory to standard therapy. Patients received intravenous and intratumoral TILT-123.

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Lung cancer remains among the most difficult-to-treat malignancies and is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The introduction of targeted therapies and checkpoint inhibitors has improved treatment outcomes; however, most patients with advanced-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) eventually fail these therapies. Therefore, there is a major unmet clinical need for checkpoint refractory/resistant NSCLC.

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Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a highly treatment-resistant cancer. Currently, the only curative treatment for PDAC is surgery, but most patients are diagnosed with metastatic disease and thus outside the scope of surgery. The majority of metastatic patients receive chemotherapy, but responses are limited.

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Introduction: Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have revolutionized the treatment of cancer, but preclinical testing of hypotheses such as combination therapies has been complicated, in part due to species incompatibility issues. For example, one of few known permissive animal models for oncolytic adenoviruses is the Syrian hamster, for which an ICI, mainly an anti-PD-L1 monoclonal antibody (mAb) was not previously available. In this study, we developed an anti-Syrian hamster PD-L1 mAb to enable the evaluation of safety and efficacy, when combining anti-PD-L1 with an oncolytic adenovirus encoding tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) and interleukin-2 (IL-2) (Ad5/3-E2F-D24-hTNFα-IRES-hIL-2 or TILT-123).

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Immunotherapy with bispecific T cell engagers has shown efficacy in patients with hematologic malignancies and uveal melanoma. Antitumor effects of bispecific T cell engagers in most solid tumors are limited due to their short serum half-life and insufficient tumor concentration. We designed a novel serotype 5/3 oncolytic adenovirus encoding a human mucin1 antibody and the human CD3 receptor, Ad5/3-E2F-d24-aMUC1aCD3 (TILT-321).

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Ovarian cancer (OvCa) is one of the most common gynecological cancers and has the highest mortality in this category. Tumors are often detected late, and unfortunately over 70% of OvCa patients experience relapse after first-line treatments. OvCa has shown low response rates to immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatments, thus leaving room for improvement.

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Cytokines have proven to be effective for cancer therapy, however whilst low-dose monotherapy with cytokines provides limited therapeutic benefit, high-dose treatment can lead to a number of adverse events. Interleukin 7 has shown promising results in clinical trials, but anti-cancer effect was limited, in part due to a low concentration of the cytokine within the tumor. We hypothesized that arming an oncolytic adenovirus with Interleukin 7, enabling high expression localized to the tumor microenvironment, would overcome systemic delivery issues and improve therapeutic efficacy.

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Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) have provided significant improvement in clinical outcomes for some patients with solid tumors. However, for patients with head and neck cancer, the response rate to ICI monotherapy remains low, leading to the exploration of combinatorial treatment strategies. In this preclinical study, we use an oncolytic adenovirus (Ad5/3) encoding hTNFα and hIL-2 and non-replicate adenoviruses (Ad5) encoding mTNFα and mIL-2 with ICI to achieve superior tumor growth control and improved survival outcomes.

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Intratumoral immunotherapies are entering clinical use but concerns remain regarding their effects on non-injected tumors. Here, we studied the impact of local treatment with an adenovirus coding for TNFa and IL-2 on systemic antitumor response in animals receiving aPD-1 (anti-programmed cell death protein 1) therapy. Using bilateral murine melanoma models, we tested systemic tumor response to combined therapy with anti-PD-1 and an adenovirus coding for TNFa and IL-2 ("virus").

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The use of cyclodextrins as drug nano-carrier systems for drug delivery is gaining importance in the pharmaceutical industry due to the interesting pharmacokinetic properties of the resulting inclusion complexes. In the present work, complexes of the anti-cancer alkaloids camptothecin and luotonin A have been prepared with β-cyclodextrin and hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin. These cyclodextrin complexes were characterized by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR).

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Immune checkpoint inhibitors such as anti-PD-1 have revolutionized the field of oncology over the past decade. Nevertheless, the majority of patients do not benefit from them. Virotherapy is a flexible tool that can be used to stimulate and/or recruit different immune populations.

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The notion of developing variants of the classic interleukin 2 (IL-2) cytokine has emerged from the limitations observed with the systemic use of human IL-2 in the clinic: severe adverse events accompanied by low therapeutic response rate in treated patients. Modifications made in the IL-2 receptor-binding structure leads to preferential binding of IL-2 variant cytokine to receptors on effector anti-tumor lymphocytes over T regulatory (TReg) cells. Because of their inherent immunogenicity, oncolytic adenoviruses are useful for expression of immunomodulatory molecules in tumors, for induction of a pro-inflammatory state in the tumor microenvironment.

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Immunotherapy with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) or oncolytic adenoviruses, have shown promising results in cancer treatment, when used as separate therapies. When used in combination, the antitumor effect is synergistically potentiated due oncolytic adenovirus infection and its immune stimulating effects on T cells. Indeed, studies in hamsters have shown a 100% complete response rate when animals were treated with oncolytic adenovirus coding for TNFa and IL-2 (Ad5/3-E2F-D24-hTNFa-IRES-hIL2; TILT-123) and TIL therapy.

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Oncolytic viruses provide a biologically multi-faceted treatment option for patients who cannot be cured with currently available treatment options. We constructed an oncolytic adenovirus, TILT-123, to support T-cell therapies and immune checkpoint inhibitors in solid tumors. Adenoviruses are immunogenic by nature, are easy to produce in large quantities, and can carry relatively large transgenes.

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Immune checkpoint inhibitors have advanced the treatment of melanoma. Nevertheless, a majority of patients are resistant, or develop resistance, to immune checkpoint blockade, which may be related to prevailing immune suppression by myeloid regulatory cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME). ORCA-010 is a novel oncolytic adenovirus that selectively replicates in, and lyses, cancer cells.

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