On August 4, 2021 Strand Therapeutics, a privately held developer of next-generation, programmable mRNA therapeutics for cancer immunotherapy and other diseases, reported that the company was awarded two Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop mRNA-based therapeutics for melanoma and triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) (Press release, Strand Therapeutics, AUG 4, 2021, View Source [SID1234585745]). The total funding amount awarded to Strand is approximately $800,000.
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While there have been advances in the development of treatment options for melanoma, the number of diagnoses continues to increase. Furthermore, standard of care using anti-PD-1 immunotherapy has been limited with not all patients responding to the therapy. To address this need, the first award granted to Strand will support the development of programmable mRNA circuits that express cytokines which regulate the activation of immune cells, to stimulate an adaptive immune response as a neoadjuvant therapy for melanoma.
TNBC is an aggressive form of breast cancer, accounting for 10-15% of all cases, and is another cancer indication in need of more targeted and effective medicines. Patients have a poor prognosis with limited treatment options. While checkpoint inhibitor therapies including anti-PD-1 antibodies have improved outcomes in patients, only a small percentage respond to this treatment strategy. The second award will allow Strand to engineer synthetic self-replicating mRNA therapies expressing locally-acting cytokines with the goal of improving anti-PD-1 therapy responses.
"It is well known that cytokines can be utilized to achieve an anti-tumor effect in cancer patients. However, treatment strategies that involve cytokines can be highly toxic, and therefore, its efficacy can be limited. To that end, we can use our programmable, self-replicating mRNA therapeutic platform to localize cytokine expression that will potentially enable more precise and longer-lasting anti-cancer immune responses," said Jake Becraft, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Strand. "This generous support from NIH’s NCI will enable us to create synthetic mRNA-based therapeutics that can be safer and more effective than currently available treatment options for both melanoma and breast cancer patients."