Sherbrooke, Que.-based medtech startup Tatum Bioscience has demonstrated promising results for its immunotherapy that it claims can scale more reliably than other cancer vaccines.
“Replicating these results in patients is our goal as we move toward clinical development.”
Kevin Neil, Tatum Bioscience
In a paper published in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer this week, results in cancer-afflicted mice showed that Tatum’s immunotherapy, delivered through a vaccine-like agent, “uncloaked” cancer cells that were previously hidden from the immune system. This allowed the body to mount a defensive response that targeted and eliminated tumours.
“The immune system can be compared to an orchestra: for a powerful antitumor response, each instrument—or cellular component—must play its part at the right moment,” Tatum CEO and co-founder Jean-François Millau said in a statement. “That’s what our drug candidate…achieves.”
Treatment with Tatum’s drug eliminated the cancerous tumours in a majority of the mice. These potentially “cured” mice were kept under observation to see if the cancer would return. The researchers injected the mice with another round of cancerous cells, but none of them developed tumours, suggesting that they may have acquired immune protection against the specific cancer.
Dr. Gerald Batist, Tatum’s medical advisor and director of Montréal’s Segal Cancer Centre at the Jewish General Hospital, called the results “a major step forward” because the treatment activates both innate and adaptive immune responses. This means it carries the potential to protect against future development of a specific cancer, acting like a vaccine.
Founded in 2019 by Université de Sherbrooke researchers, Tatum develops immunotherapy drugs to treat cancers. These types of drugs are designed to activate the body’s immune system to destroy malignant tumours. This is different from treatments like chemotherapy, which target and eliminate problematic cells, but can kill healthy ones, too.
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Scientists have been attempting to develop a reliable and scalable cancer vaccine for years, with renewed interest following the release of COVID-19 vaccines. Last month, researchers from the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center published early results of a powerful immune response against colorectal and pancreatic cancers in human patients.
Tatum argues in its paper that personalized vaccines for cancer treatment are time-consuming, expensive, and challenging to scale. In contrast to traditional vaccine types, Tatum uses nanofilaments to drive an immune response against bad actors in the body. Nanofilaments are molecular assemblies of proteins that bind to cancer cells. Tatum creates these using viruses that replicate inside bacteria, which it argues is a scalable approach. In this approach, the tumour itself acts as a source of antigens to create an immune response, making it flexible across different cancer types.
“Replicating these results in patients is our goal as we move toward clinical development,” Tatum co-founder and chief scientific officer Kevin Neil said in the statement. Millau said he hopes to pursue a clinical trial within two years.
The startup says it requires more funding in order to test this vaccine platform in humans. Tatum told Les Affaires last year that it planned to raise $45 million. So far, the company told BetaKit, it has raised a total of $5.8 million in financing, including from Québec investors such as BoxOne Ventures, Sherbrooke Innopole, and ACET Capital. This comes amid a difficult funding landscape for early-stage Canadian startups, particularly in life sciences.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Julia Koblitz.