Next-generation immunotherapies
Immunotherapies are now part of the NHS standard of care for certain cancers.
But not all patients or cancer types respond to current immunotherapies.
The NHS and BioNTech are trialling new investigational immunotherapies for people with a range of cancers.
Any medicine that is described as ‘candidate’ or ‘investigational’ means it is still in development and not approved for use outside clinical trials.
What are immunotherapies?
Immunotherapy is the term for any treatment that stimulates a patient’s immune system to fight a disease. Or uses elements from the immune system to target cancer.
Approval of the first cancer immunotherapies was a major advance, for two reasons:
They worked in some patients with cancers that had previously been very hard to treat, such as melanoma that had spread.
They worked in a totally new way compared to chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which had been the mainstays of cancer treatment for decades.
However, not all patients or cancers respond to current immunotherapies and like most cancer therapies, they can cause side effects.
Working towards a next generation of immunotherapy
BioNTech is developing a range of new investigational immunotherapies targeting more types of cancers and aiming to reduce side effects.
These include cancer vaccines and next-generation investigational immunotherapies that fall into two categories:
Protein-based therapies (e.g. antibodies)
Cell therapies
Protein-based therapies (e.g. antibodies)
Antibodies are proteins that can be made in the lab and designed to bind to a specific biological target.
These use antibodies designed to block targets (called checkpoints) that cancer cells use to evade immune attack.
Many current immunotherapies work this way. BioNTech’s candidates include drugs which combine checkpoint modulation with a second action designed to target the tumour more precisely or enhance the cancer’s responsiveness to attack.
For instance, an antibody candidate that contains two targets: one to block a checkpoint, the second to dock a cancer-fighting T cell alongside the tumour.
Some of BioNTech’s investigational immunotherapies use antibodies designed to target and bind to other key proteins on the surface of cancer cells.
Depending on the function of the target protein, this may disrupt the growth of the cancer and / or mark the cancer cell for destruction by the immune system.
Here, antibodies are designed to find and attach to cancer cells while carrying a cargo of chemotherapy drugs.
The aim is to deliver chemotherapy directly to the cell to make it more effective and reduce side effects.
Cell therapies
A type of white blood cells known as T cells are a crucial part of the immune system. T cells can kill tumour cells.
BioNTech’s candidate cell therapies are T cells engineered in the lab so that they can recognise their cancer target more precisely.
These are then delivered alongside an investigational cancer vaccine with the aim of boosting the cell therapy’s effect and making it longer lasting.
