Empowered Patient Podcast Using Oncolytic Viral Immunotherapy to Kill Solid Tumors with Dr. Paul Peter Tak Candel Therapeutics
Dr. Paul Peter Tak is the CEO and President of Candel Therapeutics, developing innovative immunotherapies for patients with solid tumors that are difficult to treat, like brain cancer, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and non-small cell lung cancer. This approach induces cell death in cancer cells at the site of injection, and it also trains cells to look for tumor cells migrating throughout the body.
Paul Peter explains, "The approach we call oncolytic viral immunotherapy. The name already indicates that we use viruses here for a good purpose, actually, to treat cancer. And immunotherapy indicates that we try to activate the patient's own immune system to fight cancer at the site of the injection, as well as at the site of the un-injected distant metastasis. Basically, you can see it as a form of what we call in situ vaccination. In situ means at the place of the injection."
"We kill the tumor cells at the site of the injection, and we do that in a way that's immunogenic. That means that we activate the immune system, and we create the optimal conditions at the site of the injection of the body's own immune system to start to recognize specifically the so-called cancer neoantigens. These are the molecules that are expressed on the surface of the cancer cells, and that can be recognized by these T cells. We call them cytotoxic T cells. The name already means that they're able to kill the tumor cells."
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