This week, we chat with Evan Appleton, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Intertwined, a company focused on understanding mammalian evolved protective traits, and how they can be transferred to humans. And we chat with Lew Bender, CEO of Intensity Therapeutics, which is pioneering an intratumoral injection therapy primarily for breast cancer that not only kills the cancer cells in the tumour but throughout the body as well, acting as almost a cancer-killing vaccine.
Times:
04:22 Intertwined
29:06 Intensity Therapeutics
Intensity Therapeutics
Intensity is a late-stage clinical biotech company whose novel engineered chemistry enables aqueous cytotoxic-containing drug formulations to mix and saturate a tumour’s dense, high-fat, pressurised environment following direct intratumoral injection.
Its clinical trials have demonstrated the ability of INT230-6 to kill tumours and elicit an adaptive immune response within days of injection, representing a new approach to cancer cell death that holds the potential to shift the treatment paradigm and turn many deadly cancers into chronic diseases, even for malignancies that do not respond to conventional immunotherapy.
Intensity has completed two clinical studies: a phase 1/2 dose-escalation study in metastatic cancers including sarcomas, and a phase 2 randomised controlled clinical trial in locally advanced breast cancer in women without undergoing chemotherapy prior to their surgery.
Intertwined
Evolution has led to species developing in different ways. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced animals that resist diseases humans still struggle to treat. The mechanisms are already there – in their cells, in their DNA.
Intertwined Biosciences is using those “blueprints” to decode disease-resistance mechanisms from the world’s most resilient animals and engineer them into human immune cells – powered by the company’s Virtual Immune Cell model.
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