During the annual Biotech Week Boston we spoke with Ziopharm Oncology CEO Laurence Cooper on his work on the commercialization of immunotherapies, both active and passive:
“The fundamental science is here. The fundamental science shows that you can do active immunotherapy to help patients, and you can do passive immunotherapies, such as with cytokines, or delivery of antibodies, that inhibit checkpoints and you can fundamentally help patients with cancer. Now the question is, ‘how far does that territory go?’”
Watch the full interview with Laurence Cooper or read some of his key points below.
Active vs. passive immunotherapy
“Immunotherapies are in two broad camps. There is the active world of immunotherapy, where cells are infused into the body and we, therefore, have programs for infusing T-cells and NK cells (Natural Killer cells). There’s also the passive immunotherapy world that seeks to energize the resident immune system in a patient with cancer. And that can be done, for instance, by administering cytokines.”
“Successful companies working in the immunotherapy space have to take on both active and passive immunotherapy. Both of those require technologies that are based on genetic modification. So, for active immunotherapy, we genetically reprogram, for instance, killer T-cells and NK cells and infuse them into patients with cancer.
In the passive world [however], we administer a virus and that virus uncodes a switch that can be activated by a patient taking a small molecule. When patients activate that switch they can make IL-12 - a master regulator of the immune system. And once IL-12 is made then the immune system gets angry, but it’s the endogenous immune system - the patient’s own immune system - that gets angry once IL-12 is delivered and then goes to work against the patient’s cancer."
The growth of immunotherapies
"Ten years ago immunotherapy was around. For instance, in my training, we were using immunotherapy, but we called it bone marrow transplantation. [Dr. Donnall] Thomas was given the Nobel prize for this back in the '90s. But Don Thomas and others in the field of bone marrow transplantation taught us the immune cells, transferred from one patient to another, could go to work on cancers, particularly leukemias that were resistant to all known therapies at the time. But those transplant biologists didn’t infuse T-cells they infused stem cells. And the stem cells begat T-cells after they were engrafted and that was a messy business….but the central principal was, we knew the immune system could work.”
Going ten years on, we’re now in a world in which we recognize the actor on the stage are the T-cells. And can we, instead of infusing stem cells infuse T-cells? Can we get rid of the messy business of transplant biology, and focus on the precise biology of T-cells, and their inherent ability to separate friend from foe?”