LIFESCIENCELEADER.COM JANUARY 2015
26
W A Y N E K O B E R S T E I N Executive Editor
L L E W K E L T N E R , M.D., Ph.D. Roundtable Moderator
COMBINATION
— A VIRTUAL
ROUNDTABLE
In the end, there were too many responses, too many willing participants, for
our virtual roundtable to include them all. We end our Combination Cancer
Immunotherapy series with this final installment, Part Five, featuring input from
four of the hottest companies in the field: Merck & Co. (MSD, outside North
America), Five Prime Therapeutics, Heat Biologics, and OncoSec. Editorial space
considerations demand a finale to the series, leaving out at least eight of the
two dozen companies that submitted discussion responses and more expressing
interest. Our apologies to those companies, to whom and for whom we owe
some explanation.
Our final selection reflects a simple criteria: We chose companies with a range
of technologies and at various stages of development, whose immunotherapies
directly target the immune system primarily by altering immune cells, as do
the checkpoint inhibitors. (One semi-exception, OncoSec, has an intratumoral
therapy designed to be synergistic with checkpoint inhibition.) Plenty of other
approaches can claim some immunotherapeutic action by targeting the tumor
antigens or microenvironment. But the number of candidates and alternative
mechanisms of that sort is now proliferating beyond our ability to do anything
but show some examples. At some point, we had to decide when to call an end
or go on forever publishing company responses.
A SERIES ON THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF USING
NEW AGENTS TO RALLY THE IMMUNE SYSTEM AGAINST CANCER
CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY
COMBINATION
CANCER
IMMUNOTHERAPY
—
A
VIRTUAL
ROUNDTABLE
By
W.
Koberstein
leaders
ROUNDTABLE