Patient Selection Strategies Based on Tumor Microenvironment to Determine Appropriate Immuno-Oncology Therapies with John Celebi Sensei Biotherapeutics

Empowered Patient Podcast

John Celebi, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Sensei Biotherapeutics, emphasizes the need to develop better patient selection strategies and next-generation therapeutics for cancer patients. Through their Tumor Microenvironment-Activated Biologics platform (TMAb), Sensei develops conditionally active therapeutics designed to be active only within the low-pH tumor microenvironment. Current pipeline candidates are designed to be active only within the low-pH tumor microenvironment and show potential to overcome the challenges of VISTA, a promising checkpoint target.

John explains, "As an industry, we have some tough choices. Other strategies, both within and outside of IO, have made much better progress in targeting which patients will respond and which patients won't respond to treatment. Those are decisions that we have to make as an industry to keep up."

"The second one I would point to is that we're now in a decade after the first immuno-oncology drug approval. And so, we have a whole generation of patients now that have been exposed to checkpoint therapy, and that are now many of whom resistant to checkpoint therapy. We call that acquired resistance. And so the game has really changed. It's an open question: whether the first PD-1 drugs would be approved today if all of those patients had been treated with some other checkpoint therapy prior to it raises the bar. This means new strategies are needed to treat patients with acquired resistance to immunotherapy."

"One of the interesting things about VISTA is that it does play a key role in the tumor microenvironment. The tumor microenvironment is unique because it's an environment inside the body in which cells proliferate very rapidly. That leads to a whole host of subsequent changes that affect the outcome of therapy, the fact that when cells are dividing rapidly, the pH in the area tends to drop, and it becomes more acidic. And that's directly related to the function of VISTA. It's one of the things that makes VISTA unique because VISTA is only activated as an immune checkpoint under lower pH conditions."

#SenseiBio #ImmunOncology #PatientSelection #Immunotherapy #Cancer #Tumors #ImmuneCheckpointTargets #VISTA

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