Large Unmet Medical Need
Cancer is a complex disease or rather, a collection of many types of diseases, but cancer itself has a simple definition. Cancer is a genetic disease caused by mutations. Approximately 90 percent of new cancer diagnoses are solid tumors, which occur when cancer cells grow uncontrollably and cluster together to form a lump or mass.
Alaunos’ Approach to Cancer
Despite billions of dollars in research in government labs, academic medical centers and biopharmaceutical companies, current treatment options remain mostly limited to surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, all of which come with challenging side effects and limited therapeutic efficacy. Recently, a fourth approach in immunotherapy has emerged to leverage or manipulate a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer. Alaunos is developing immunotherapies with our non-viral TCR-T cell therapy platform.
Solid Tumors
Approximately 90% of new cancer diagnoses are solid tumors, which occur when uncontrollably growing cancer cells cluster together and form a lump or mass. Alaunos is advancing a novel approach to fight solid tumors. Under a research and development agreement with MD Anderson Cancer Center to advance Sleeping Beauty in the fight against solid tumors, we are bioengineering T-cell receptors, or TCRs, that will target so-called neoantigens which are specific to an individual patient’s cancer.
Alaunos is advancing a novel non-viral patient-specific approach to fight the majority of solid tumors.