Response rates to cancer immunotherapy remain unsatisfactorily low. Current approaches deliver these therapies to patients with advanced disease and a preferable approach might be to deliver immunotherapy in the context of a minuscule tumor burden to be found post-surgery. In this context, PPI-100 can help generate systemic immunity by reprogramming the body’s response to surgery from an immunosuppressive to an immunoactive one, leading to the eradication of residual disease in the postoperative bed of the resected tumor and in metastases in different body tissues such as lymph nodes, spleen, lungs, liver, etc.
Pattern is hence focused on the development of PPI-100 for the perioperative treatment of cancer patients undergoing surgical resection for whom rapid tumor recurrence is of significant clinical concern, noting that surgery is the standard of care for most patients with solid tumors but more than 40% of patients suffer a relapse within five years. Broadly, our approach engages both the innate & adaptive machinery of the immune system to prevent both local tumor recurrence and to mitigate the risk of the formation of distant metastases.
PPI-100 achieves these results by virtue of its impact on myeloid lineage cells (dendritic cells, monocytes, and macrophages) and, through these cells, on innate lymphoid cells such as NK cells. Noteworthy in this regard is that a large proportion of immune cells in & around solid tumors, in the tumor microenvironment, derive from the innate immune system being mainly myeloid lineage cells and innate lymphoid cells – which constitute prime targets for activation by PPI-100.
Clinically, Pattern believes its approach has the potential to be broadly applicable across a wide spectrum of solid cancers that are resected, and its vision is thus that all cancer patients undergoing surgical tumor resection receive intraoperative immunotherapy to prevent post-surgical recurrence and metastasis.
More generally, based on its mechanism of action, PPI-100 may find application in a range of cancers, both as a monotherapy and in combination therapy. Additionally, based on data generated, PPI-100 has other applications against infectious diseases, or as a vaccine carrier/adjuvant.