leukemia

CIRM-supported therapy for blood cancers gets FDA fast track

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People often complain about how long it can take to turn a scientific discovery into an approved therapy for patients. And they’re right. It can take years, decades even. But for Immune-Onc Therapeutics the path to FDA approval may just have been shortened.

Back in April of 2021 the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) approved investing $6 million in Immune-Onc to conduct a clinical trial for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML). AML and CMML are both types of blood cancer. AML affects approximately 20,000 people in the United States each year and has a 5-year survival rate of about 25 percent. Anywhere from 15-30 percent of CMML cases eventually progress into AML.

Dr. Paul Woodard and his team are treating patients with an antibody therapy called IO-202 that targets leukemic stem cells.  The antibody works by blocking a signal named LILRB4 which is associated with decreased rates of survival in AML patients.  The goal is to attain complete cancer remissions and prolonged survival.

Well, they must be doing something right because they just received Fast Track designation from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for IO-202. Getting this designation is a big deal because its goal is to speed up the development and review of drugs to treat serious conditions and fill an unmet medical need to get important new medicines to patients earlier.

Getting a Fast Track designation means the team at Immune-Onc may be:

  • Eligible for more written communications and even face-to-face meetings with the FDA to discuss the development plan of IO-202
  • Eligible for Accelerated Approval and Priority Review if relevant criteria are met, which may result in faster approval.

In a press release Dr. Woodard said this was great news.  “We are pleased that the FDA has granted IO-202 Fast Track designation in recognition of its potential to improve outcomes for people with relapsed or refractory AML. We look forward to working closely with the FDA to accelerate the clinical development of IO-202, which is currently being evaluated as a monotherapy and in combination with other agents in a Phase 1 dose escalation and expansion trial in patients with AML with monocytic differentiation and in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML).”

The FDA also granted IO-202 Orphan Drug Designation for treatment of AML in 2020. That’s defined as a therapy that’s intended for the treatment, prevention or diagnosis of a rare disease or condition, affecting less than 200,000 persons in the US.

Getting Orphan Drug Designation qualifies Immune-Onc for incentives including tax credits for clinical trials and the potential for seven years of market exclusivity if and when it is fully approved by the FDA.

Stem Cell Agency Board Invests in Therapy Targeting Deadly Blood Cancers

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

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Dr. Ezra Cohen, photo courtesy UCSD

Hematologic malignancies are cancers that affect the blood, bone marrow and lymph nodes and include different forms of leukemia and lymphoma. Current treatments can be effective, but in those patients that do not respond, there are few treatment options. Today, the governing Board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) approved investing $4.1 million in a therapy aimed at helping patients who have failed standard therapy.

Dr. Ezra Cohen, at the University of California San Diego, and Oncternal Therapeutics are targeting a protein called ROR1 that is found in B cell malignancies, such as leukemias and lymphomas, and solid tumors such as breast, lung and colon. They are using a molecule called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that can enable a patient’s own T cells, an important part of the immune system, to target and kill their cancer cells. These cells are derived from a related approach with an antibody therapy that targets ROR1-binding medication called Cirmtuzumab, also created with CIRM support. This CAR-T product is designed to recognize and kill cancer stem cells that express ROR1.

This is a late-stage preclinical project so the goal is to show they can produce enough high-quality cells to treat patients, as well as complete other regulatory measures needed for them to apply to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for permission to test the therapy in a clinical trial in people.

If given the go-ahead by the FDA the therapy will target patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).  

“CAR-T cell therapies represent a transformational advance in the treatment of hematologic malignancies,” says Dr. Maria T. Millan, CIRM’s President and CEO. “This approach addresses the need to develop new therapies for patients whose cancers are resistant to standard chemotherapies, who have few therapeutic options and a very poor chance or recovery.”

De-stressing stem cells and the Bonnie & Clyde of stem cells

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Dr. John Cashman

The cells in our body are constantly signalling with each other, it’s a critical process by which cells communicate not just with other cells but also with elements within themselves. One of the most important signalling pathways is called Wnt. This plays a key role in early embryonic and later development. But when Wnt signalling goes wrong, it can also help spur the growth of cancer.

Researchers at the Human BioMolecular Research Institute (HBRI) and Stanford University, have reported on a compound that can trigger a cascade of events that create stress and ultimately impact Wnt’s ability to control the ability of cells to repair themselves.

In a news release Dr. Mark Mercola, a co-author of a CIRM-funded study – published in the journal Cell Chemical Biology – says this is important: “because it explains why stressed cells cannot regenerate and heal tissue damage. By blocking the ability to respond to Wnt signaling, cellular stress prevents cells from migrating, replicating and differentiating.”

The researchers discovered a compound PAWI-2 that shows promise in blocking the compound that causes this cascade of problems. Co-author Dr. John Cashman says PAWI-2 could lead to treatments in a wide variety of cancers such as pancreatic, breast, prostate and colon cancer.

“As anti-cancer PAWI-2 drug development progresses, we expect PAWI-2 to be less toxic than current therapeutics for pancreatic cancer, and patients will benefit from improved safety, less side effects and possibly with significant cost-savings.”

Dr. Catriona Jamieson: Photo courtesy Moores Cancer Center, UCSD

Speaking of cancer….

Stem cells have many admirable qualities. However, one of their less admirable ones is their ability to occasionally turn into cancer stem cells. Like regular stem cells these have the ability to renew and replicate themselves over time, but as cancer stem cells they use that ability to help fuel the growth and spread of cancer in the body. Now, researchers at U.C. San Diego are trying to better understand how those regular stem cells become cancer stem cells, so they can stop that process.

In a CIRM-funded study Dr. Catriona Jamieson and her team identified two molecules, APOBEC3C and ADAR1, that play a key role in this process.

In a news release Jamieson said: “APOBEC3C and ADAR1 are like the Bonnie and Clyde of pre-cancer stem cells — they drive the cells into malignancy.”

So they studied blood samples from 54 patients with leukemia and 24 without. They found that in response to inflammation, APOBEC3C promotes the rapid production of pre-leukemia stem cells. That in turn enables ADAR1 to go to work, interfering with gene expression in a way that helps those pre-leukemia stem cells turn into leukemia stem cells.

They also found when they blocked the action of ADAR1 or silenced the gene in patient cells in the laboratory, they were able to stop the formation of leukemia stem cells.

The study is published in the journal Cell Reports.

Inspiring new documentary about stem cell research

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Poster for the documentary “Ending Disease”

2020 has been, to say the very least, a difficult and challenging year for all of us. But while the focus of the world has, understandably, been on the coronavirus there was also some really promising advances in stem cell research. Those advances are captured in a great new documentary called Ending Disease.

The documentary is by Emmy award-winning filmmaker Joe Gantz. In it he follows ten people who are facing life-threatening or life-changing diseases and injuries and who turn to pioneering stem cell therapies for help.

It’s an inspiring documentary, one that reminds you of the real need for new treatments and the tremendous hope and promise of stem cell therapies. Here’s a look at a trailer for Ending Disease.

You can see an exclusive screening of Ending Disease on Friday, January 8th, 2021 at 5:00pm PST.

After the livestream, there will be a live Q&A session where former members of the successful Proposition 14 campaign team – which refunded CIRM with an additional $5.5 billion – will be joined by CIRM’s President and CEO Dr. Maria Millan, talking about what lies ahead for CIRM and the future of stem cell research.

To purchase a ticket, click here. It only costs $12 and 50% of the ticket sales proceeds will go to Americans for Cures to help them continue to advocate for the advancement of stem cell research, and more importantly, for the patients and families to whom stem cell research provides so much hope.

If you need any extra persuading that it’s something you should definitely put on our calendar, here’s a letter from the film maker Joe Gantz.

I am the director of the documentary Ending Disease: The Stem Cell, Anti-Cancer T-Cell, & Antibody Revolution In Medicine, a film that will help inform people about the progress that’s been made in this field and how people with their lives on the line are now able to benefit from these new regenerative therapies. 

I was granted unprecedented access to ten of the first generation of clinical trials using stem cell and regenerative medicine to treat and cure many of the most devastating diseases and conditions including: brain cancer, breast cancer, leukemia and lymphoma, HIV, repairing a broken spinal cord, retinitis pigmentosa and SCID. The results are truly inspiring.

This is personal for me.  After spending four years making this documentary, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Upon diagnosis, I immediately felt the same desperation as millions of families who are in search of a medical breakthrough. I understood, on a personal level, what the patients we followed in the film all knew: when you are diagnosed with a disease, there is a narrow window of time in which you can effectively seek a life-saving treatment or cure. If treatment becomes available outside of that window, then it is too late. However, Ending Disease shows that with continued support for regenerative medicine, we can create a near future in which one-time cures and highly mitigating therapies are available to patients for a whole host of diseases.

Best regards,

Joe

Remembering a stem cell pioneer in the fight against HIV/AIDS

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment
Timothy Ray Brown. Photo courtesy Seattle Times

Timothy Ray Brown, a man who was the first person to be cured of HIV, giving hope to millions of people around the world, died at his home in Palm Springs this week. He was just 54 years old.

For years Brown was known simply as “the Berlin patient” because that was where he was living when he made medical history. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1995 and began taking medications to keep the virus under control. He was later also diagnosed with leukemia. He underwent several rounds of treatment for the leukemia, but it kept recurring.

By 2007 Brown’s physician decided the best way to treat the leukemia was with a blood stem cell transplant. But the doctor also wanted to see if using the stem cells from a donor who had a natural immunity to the AIDS virus could help treat Brown’s HIV. While such donors are very rare, the doctor succeeded in finding one whose bone marrow carried the CCR5 gene, a mutation that is believed to provide resistance to HIV. The transplant was a success, putting Brown’s leukemia into remission and eliminating detectable traces of HIV. For the first time in years he was able to stop taking the medications that had helped keep the virus under control.

The procedure quickly garnered world-wide attention. But not everyone was convinced it was real. Some questioned if Brown’s HIV had really been eradicated and speculated that the virus was merely suppressed. But with each passing year, and no signs of the virus recurring, more and more people came to believe it was a cure.

Initially Brown remained in the background, preferring not to be identified. But three years after his transplant he decided he had to come forward and put a face on “the Berlin patient”. In an interview with the website ContagionLive he explained why:

“At some point, I decided I didn’t want to be the only person in the world cured of H.I.V.,” I wanted there to be more. And the way to do that was to show the world who I am and be an advocate for H.I.V.”

He proved to be a powerful advocate, talking at international conferences and serving as living-proof that stem cells could help lead to a cure for HIV.

But while he managed to beat HIV, he could not beat leukemia. He suffered relapses that required another transplant and a difficult recovery. When it returned again this time, there was little physicians could do.

But Timothy Ray Brown did get to see his hope of not being the only patient cured seemingly come true. In September of last year researchers announced they had successfully treated a second person, known as “the London patient” using the same technique that cured Brown.

While it wasn’t the role he would have chosen Brown was a pioneer. His experience showed that a deadly virus could be cured. His courage in not just overcoming the virus but in overcoming his own reluctance to take center stage and becoming a symbol of hope for millions remain and will never die.  

Since Brown’s transplant many other scientists have attempted to replicate the procedure that cured Brown, in the hopes of making it available to many more people.

CIRM has funded three clinical trials targeting HIV, two of which are still active. Dr. Mehrdad Abedi at UC Davis and Dr. John Zaia at City of Hope are both using the patient’s own blood forming stem cells to try and defeat the virus.

If they succeed, some of the credit should go to Timothy Ray Brown, the man who led the way.

Super charging killer cells to fight leukemia

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments
Colorized scanning electron micrograph of a natural killer cell.
Photo credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Racing car drivers are forever tinkering with their cars, trying to streamline them and soup up their engines because while fast is good, faster is better. Researchers do the same things with potential anti-cancer therapies, tinkering with them to make them safer and more readily available to patients while also boosting their ability to fight cancer.

That’s what researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), in a CIRM-funded study, have done. They’ve taken immune system cells – with the already impressive name of ‘natural killer’ (NK) cells – and made them even deadlier to cancers.

These natural killer (NK) cells are considered one of our immune system’s frontline weapons against outside threats to our health, things like viruses and cancer. But sometimes the cancers manage to evade the NKs and spread throughout the body or, in the case of leukemia, throughout the blood.

Lots of researchers are looking at ways of taking a patient’s own NK cells and, in the lab boosting their ability to fight these cancers. However, using a patient’s own cells is both time consuming and very, very expensive.

Dan Kaufman MD

Dr. Dan Kaufman and his team at UCSD decided it would be better to try and develop an off-the-shelf approach, a therapy that could be mass produced from a single batch of NK cells and made available to anyone in need.

Using the iPSC method (which turns tissues like skin or blood into embryonic stem cell-like cells, capable of becoming any other cell in the body) they created a line of NK cells. Then they removed a gene called CISH which slows down the activities of cytokines, acting as a kind of brake or restraint on the immune system.

In a news release, Dr. Kaufman says removing CISH had a dramatic effect, boosting the power of the NK cells.

“We found that CISH-deleted iPSC-derived NK cells were able to effectively cure mice that harbor human leukemia cells, whereas mice treated with the unmodified NK cells died from the leukemia.”

Dr. Kaufman says the next step is to try and develop this approach for testing in people, to see if it can help people whose disease is not responding to conventional therapies.

“Importantly, iPSCs provide a stable platform for gene modification and since NK cells can be used as allogeneic cells (cells that come from donors) that do not need to be matched to individual patients, we can create a line of appropriately modified iPSC-derived NK cells suitable for treating hundreds or thousands of patients as a standardized, ‘off-the-shelf’ therapy.”

The study is published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Human immune cells made using pluripotent stem cells in world first

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Dr. Andrew Elfanty (left) and Dr. Ed Stanley (right), Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia

Our immune system is the first line of defense our bodies use to fight off infections and disease. One crucial component of this defense mechanism are lymphocytes, which are specialized cells that give rise to various kinds of immune cells, such as a T cell, designed to attack and destroy harmful foreign bodies. Problems in how certain immune cells are formed can lead to diseases such as leukemia and other immune system related disorders.

But how exactly do immune cells form early on in the body?

Dr. Andrew Elfanty and Dr. Ed Stanley at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia have reproduced and visualized a method in the laboratory used to create human immune cells from pluripotent stem cells, a kind of stem cell that can make virtually any kind of cell in the body. Not only can this unlock a better understanding of leukemia and other immune related diseases, it could potentially lead to a patient’s own skin cells being used to produce new cells for cancer immunotherapy or to test autoimmune disease therapies.

Dr. Elefanty and Dr. Stanley used genetic engineering and a unique way of growing stem cells to make this discovery.

As observed in this video, the team was able to engineer pluripotent stem cells to glow green when they expressed a specific protein found in early immune cells. These cells can be seen migrating along blood vessels outlined in red. These cells go on to populate the thymus, which as we discussed in an earlier blog, is an organ that is crucial in developing functional T cells.

In a press release from Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Dr. Stanley talks about the important role these early immune cells might play.

“We think these early cells might be important for the correct maturation of the thymus, the organ that acts as a nursery for T-cells”

In addition to this, the team also isolated the green, glowing pluripotent stem cells and showed that they could be used for multiple immune cell types, including those necessary for shaping the development of the immune system as a whole.

In the same press release, Dr. Elefanty discusses the future direction that their research could lead to.

“Although a clinical application is likely still years away, we can use this new knowledge to test ideas about how diseases like childhood leukemia and type 1 diabetes develop. Understanding more about the steps these cells go through, and how we can more efficiently nudge them down a desired pathway, is going to be crucial to that process.”

The full results to this study were published in Nature Cell Biology.

Researchers create a better way to grow blood stem cells

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment
UCLA’s Dr. Hanna Mikkola and Vincenzo Calvanese, lead scientists on the study. Photo courtesy UCLA

Blood stem cells are a vital part of us. They create all the other kinds of blood cells in our body and are used in bone marrow transplants to help people battling leukemia or other blood cancers. The problem is growing these blood stem cells outside the body has always proved challenging. Up till now.

Researchers at UCLA, with CIRM funding, have identified a protein that seems to play a key role in helping blood stem cells renew themselves in the lab. Why is this important? Because being able to create a big supply of these cells could help researchers develop new approaches to treating a wide array of life-threatening diseases.

One of the most important elements that a stem cell has is its ability to self-renew itself over long periods of time. The problem with blood stem cells has been that when they are removed from the body they quickly lose their ability to self-renew and die off.

To discover why this is the case the team at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA analyzed blood stem cells to see which genes turn on and off as those cells turn into other kinds of blood cells – red, white and platelets. They identified one gene, called MLLT3, which seemed to play a key role in helping blood stem cells self-renew.

To test this finding, the researchers took blood stem cells and, in the lab, inserted copies of the MLLT3 gene into them. The modified cells were then able to self-renew at least 12 times; a number far greater than in the past.

Dr. Hanna Mikkola, a senior author of the study says this finding could help advance the field:

“If we think about the amount of blood stem cells needed to treat a patient, that’s a significant number. But we’re not just focusing on quantity; we also need to ensure that the lab-created blood stem cells can continue to function properly by making all blood cell types when transplanted.”

Happily, that seemed to be the case. When they subjected the MLLT3-enhanced blood stem cells to further analysis they found that they appeared to self-renew at a safe rate and didn’t multiply too much or mutate in ways that could lead to leukemia or other blood cancers.

The next steps are to find more efficient and effective ways of keeping the MLLT3 gene active in blood stem cells, so they can develop ways of using this finding in a clinical setting with patients.

Their findings are published in the journal Nature.

UCLA Conducts CAR-T Cell Clinical Trial for Patients with Recurring and Non-Responsive Cancers

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Dr. Sarah Larson (left) and Dr. Yvonne Chen (right)

There have been many advances made towards the treatment of various cancers, such as deadly forms of leukemia and lymphoma, that were once considered a death sentence and thought to be incurable. Unfortunately, there are still people who do not respond to treatment or eventually relapse and see the cancer return. However, researchers at UCLA are attempting to fine-tune some of these approaches to help people with these recurring and non-treatment responding cancers.

Diagram describing CAR-T cell therapy

Dr. Sarah Larson and Dr. Yvonne Chen at UCLA are conducting a clinical trial that involves genetically-modifying a patient’s own T cells, which are an immune system cell that can destroy foreign or abnormal cells. The T-cells are modified with a protein called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), which identifies and destroys the cancer by detecting a specific protein, referred to as an antigen, on the cancer cells. These genetically modified T-cells are referred to as CAR-T cells and are re-introduced back into the patient as part of the therapy.

Previous CAR-T cells developed can only recognize one specific protein. For example, one FDA-approved CAR-T cell therapy is able to recognize a protein called CD19, which is found in B-cell lymphoma and leukemia. However, over time, the cancer cells can lose the CD19 antigen, making the CAR-T cell ineffective and can result in a reoccurrence of the cancer.

In a news release by UCLA, Dr. Larson describes the limitations of this design:

“One of the reasons CAR T cell therapy can stop working in patients is because the cancer cells escape from therapy by losing the antigen CD19, which is what the CAR T cells are engineered to target.”

But Dr. Larson and Dr. Chen are using a CAR-T cell that is able to recognize not one by two proteins simultaneously. In addition to recognizing CD19, their CAR-T cell is also able to recognize a protein called CD20, which is also found in B-cell lymphoma and leukemia. This is called a bispecific CAR-T cell because of it’s ability to identify two protein targets simultaneously.

In the same UCLA news release, Dr. Larson hopes that this approach will be more effective:

“One way to keep the CAR T cells working is to have more than one antigen to target. So by using both CD19 and CD20, the thought is that it will be more effective and prevent the loss of the antigen, which is known as antigen escape, one of the common mechanisms of resistance.”

Before the clinical trial, Dr. Chen and her team at UCLA conducted preclinical studies that showed how using bispecific CAR-T cells provided a much better defense compared to single target CAR-T cells against tumors in mice.

In the same UCLA news release, Dr. Chen elaborate on the results of her preclinical studies:

“Based on these results, we’re quite optimistic that the bispecific CAR can achieve therapeutic improvement over the single-input CD19 CAR that’s currently available.”

This first-in-humans study will evaluate the therapy in patients with non-Hodgkin’s B-cell lymphoma or chronic lymphocytic leukemia that has come back or has not responded to treatment. The goal is to determine a safe therapeutic dose.

Stem cell progress and promise in fighting leukemia

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
Computer illustration of a cancerous white blood cell in leukemia.

There is nothing you can do to prevent or reduce your risk of leukemia. That’s not a very reassuring statement considering that this year alone almost 62,000 Americans will be diagnosed with leukemia; almost 23,000 will die from the disease. That’s why CIRM is funding four clinical trials targeting leukemia, hoping to develop new approaches to treat, and even cure it.

That’s also why our next special Facebook Live “Ask the Stem Cell Team” event is focused on this issue. Join us on Thursday, August 29th from 1pm to 2pm PDT to hear a discussion about the progress in, and promise of, stem cell research for leukemia.

We have two great panelists joining us:

Dr. Crystal Mackall, has many titles including serving as the Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy.  She is using an innovative approach called a Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T Cell Therapy. This works by isolating a patient’s own T cells (a type of immune cell) and then genetically engineering them to recognize a protein on the surface of cancer cells, triggering their destruction. This is now being tested in a clinical trial funded by CIRM.

Natasha Fooman. To describe Natasha as a patient advocate would not do justice to her experience and expertise in fighting blood cancer and advocating on behalf of those battling the disease. For her work she has twice been named “Woman of the Year” by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. In 2011 she was diagnosed with a form of lymphoma that was affecting her brain. Over the years, she would battle lymphoma three times and undergo chemotherapy, radiation and eventually a bone marrow transplant. Today she is cancer free and is a key part of a CIRM team fighting blood cancer.

We hope you’ll join us to learn about the progress being made using stem cells to combat blood cancers, the challenges ahead but also the promising signs that we are advancing the field.

We also hope you’ll take an active role by posting questions on Facebook during the event, or sending us questions ahead of time to info@cirm.ca.gov. We will do our best to address as many as we can.

Here’s the link to the event, feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested in joining us for Facebook Live “Ask the Stem Cell Team about Leukemia”