Medicenna Therapeutics (MDNA.TO) said Wednesday that its lead compound MDNA11 was featured in a poster presentation describing the investigator-sponsored NEO-CYT trial at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), annual meeting in Chicago.
While surgery has been the first course of action in treating locally advanced melanoma, a recent study has shown that administering combination immunotherapy, comprised of two pre-operative cycles of ipilimumab plus nivolumab, is much more effective than the previous post-surgery standard.
However, 41% of patients did not achieve a major pathologic response (meaning <10% of viable tumor). The hypothesis of the NEO-CYT trial is to investigate if patient outcomes can be improved over the gold-standard of care by introducing MDNA11 in combination with nivolumab +/- ipilimumab, the company said. The study aims to enroll up to 80 patients across four treatment arms.
"NEO-CYT provides an important opportunity to evaluate MDNA11, a potentially best-in-class IL-2 superagonist, in a frontline neoadjuvant setting where immune activation may be especially impactful," said Fahar Merchant, chief executive officer. " If the tumor is still present at the time of the treatment, the immune cells 'see' more of the cancer cells. This allows the most potent anti-tumor immune cells to expand and attack the tumor and can remain active in the body for many years, preventing the tumors from recurring."
Merchant noted that the NEO-CYT trial complements Medicenna's ongoing ABILITY-1 study, which is also advancing MDNA11 into earlier lines of therapy through expansion cohorts in various cancers.
The company will share updates on the ABILITY-1 trial and the NEO-CYT study in the second half of this year.
Medicenna shares were last seen up $0.005, to $0.425, on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
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