Omid Veiseh, PhD an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University, talks about how drug factories will not only kill ovarian cancer, but also transform the way we think about treating other diseases.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in May 2022.
You are tackling a problem that I think a lot of people feel if you get diagnosed with this, it’s a death sentence.
VEISEH: I had a family friend who developed ovarian cancer. And it really prompted me to learn a lot more about the disease. And right here in Houston, we’re right across the street from one of the largest cancer research centers in the world, M.D. Anderson. So I started talking to clinicians across the street about some of the challenges that exist with treating patients with ovarian cancer.
And what are those challenges?
VEISEH: So the nature of the cancer is that, you know, patients are typically diagnosed late. And by the time they’re diagnosed, there’s cancer all over the intraperitoneal space, the space, you know, in your stomach, that – where all the organs are. And surgery is often futile. And as the cancer grows, it creates a lot of fluid around it. They call these they’re ascites. And this actually limits the amount of drugs that can get into the site where the tumor is. It’s a bit like swimming upstream. Conventional chemotherapy is really through I.V. bags that go into your arm. And in this case, trying to get the drug into the stomach area is very challenging.
So, you are developing an implantable device that helps this process?
VEISEH: Yeah. So we started talking to the clinicians about this concept of having an implant that could be placed in the stomach area right next to where there’s all this cancer and have this implant actually be loaded with engineered cells that would secrete a biologic that would activate the immune system. In this particular case, we focused on a drug called interleukin two. It’s clinically approved today with the trademark Pro Lukin. Pro Lukin is immunotherapy drug that has shown some promise with renal cancer and melanoma, but it also has some really terrible side effects because it’s administered through the intravascular route. And you have to administer a lot of the drug because in order to get it to the sites you need, you need to like really administer quite a lot of the dose. This can cause all your immune cells in your blood to immediately become activated. And it can only be administered in an ICU. And patients don’t tolerate it very well. So it’s not used in very many patients. Where we need the drug is actually right next to the tumor. That’s where we want to awaken the immune system, have it start fighting the cancer cells. And so we conceived of this system, which could be a small implant. These beads that are 1.5 millimeters in size in diameter, they get implanted into the stomach area. And they reside there producing this Pro Luken drug and the interleukin two adjacent to the implant for a pre-programmed amount of time, 2 to 4 weeks. And in that time frame, in our mouse data, we’ve shown that in as little as six days we see the cancer completely gone. And that’s because we’ve been trained the immune system to now fight the cancer cells and kill them off. And even more exciting in our studies, we’ve shown that once the tumor is gone, when we try to challenge the animals again with the same tumor, they were now protected against it. So which suggests that the immune cells that have learned what the cancer looks like, they can now migrate throughout the body, find and destroy the cancer wherever it may be.
Does the implant stay forever then? Do you have to go back and take it out or?
VEISEH: It’s a very small implant size of this volume. Like we’re talking 10 CCs. And at the moment we have no plans in going to take it out. It’s biocompatible and the body won’t reject it. It’s a bit like tissue filler material that people might get in their face for wrinkles.
Do you have pictures of it? Of the implant?
VEISEH: Yeah. Yeah. We have some of the beads.
Which came first, the diabetes thought process or the ovarian cancer?
VEISEH: I think, you know, diabetes is something that I’ve been working on for much longer. I started on this when I was a post-doc at MIT. And I’ve started a company in this space – Siglion Therapeutics actually pushing this into the clinic. And we have a big partnership with Eli Lilly. The diabetes…
Because it this feels like they’re a little similar.
VEISEH: Yeah. I think the concept of leveraging cells as drug factories is an emerging concept that I think is going to be the future of medicine. Because when we think about the pharmaceutical industry today, the pipeline of drugs that exist, they’re all biologics in nature. And biologics are made by cells in just giant bioreactors outside, you know, in these factories. So my vision is can we bring that manufacturing directly into the patient and have the biologic produce in the patient on an as needed basis? This could have profound implications on many different diseases – type one diabetes, cancer, other autoimmune diseases, genetic disorders where you’re missing certain proteins. All of these could be really addressed through cellular factories.
Is this something that can just do away with chemo?
VEISEH: Yeah. We’re hoping that the future is going to be training your immune system to fight the cancer. And there’s really good evidence that that works in terms of there’s several drugs that exist today. There are checkpoint inhibitors which have been really effective against lung cancer. There are products, cell therapies against blood cancers. We’re hoping that as these new modalities that all are aimed at addressing the – activating the immune system in the proper way and controlling that immune response are going to transform how we think about cancer treatment.
So, in your studies of animals with this ovarian drug factories, do you have any specific numbers like in all these 80% of the mice it stopped ovarian cancer or?
VEISEH: So, we actually tried these drug factories in ovarian cancer animal models. And, you know, within a week in all eight out of ten mice that had the cancer, we saw the cancer disappear. We also tried it in colorectal cancer. And there it was, seven out of eight cases the cancer was eradicated. And in all the cases, once the cancer was eradicated, when we challenged those same mice with the same cancer again, they also were protected against recurrence.
So, in this case, I was reading sounds like it’s going to go into human clinical trials pretty soon.
VEISEH: So, we’ve started a company that has licensed this technology – Avenge Bio. They’re based out of Natick, Massachusetts. And they’ve been working with the FDA. We’ve had several meetings with the FDA over the last few years. And we remain on track to start human clinical trials in the second half of 2022. So we’ll begin dosing patients there. We have several sites already identified with clinicians on board as investigators of those trials. And, you know, we hope to see how this works in patients. That’s the real experiment then.
So, tell me about this. You said.
VEISEH: So these are the implants that we were just describing. You can see these individual beads. Inside each bead, there’s 40,000 engineered cells. These cells are programmed to produce the drug interleukin two. This is about the dose that a patient would receive. These will be administered not surgically, but through a needle system that would just implant these right into the peritoneal space. And the beauty of this approach is that those cells actually they work every day. So every single day they’re pumping out new drug. And that’s why we only need to administer this once.
And how long does that drug continue to be administrated?
VEISEH: So, the cells are engineered with the material to only last less than 30 days. So, they’ll continue making drugs for that one-month period and then they shut off.
END OF INTERVIEW
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