Empowered Patient Podcast Developing Immunotherapies Using Oncolytic Viruses to Change the Tumor Microenvironment with Dr. Paul Peter Tak Candel Therapeutics
Dr. Paul Peter Tak is the President and CEO of Candel Therapeutics which is focused on educating the immune system to recognize and kill tumor cells in patients with a solid tumor. Candel is developing immunotherapies using engineered oncolytic viruses for prostate cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and eye cancer.
Paul Peter explains, "Viruses probably got a bad reputation during the pandemic, but you can actually use them to do something beneficial to a patient, and that's what we are doing. So, using molecular engineering, we change the viruses in such a way that they infect the tumor cells and that they induce cell death. They kill the tumor cells in a way that activates the patient's own immune system, which is basically a very natural way to fight cancer."
"So, at the same time, we change the so-called tumor microenvironment from a cold tumor, a tumor that is not very active in terms of immune activity, into a hot tumor where we activate a whole variety of immune cells. And that's an optimal way to immunize the patient against the patient's own variety of so-called cancer neoantigens, the molecules that are being recognized by the patient's immune system."
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