The first patient has been recruited in an exploratory Phase Ib clinical trial of Targovax’s second product from its RAS-peptide immunotherapy platform, TG02.
Cancer cell
In the open-label, non-randomised trial — to be conducted at clinical sites in Australia and New Zealand — ten patients will receive TG02 as monotherapy followed by ten patients receiving it in combination with pembrolizumab, a PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor. All participants in the study will have locally recurrent RAS-mutated rectal cancer and will be scheduled to have surgery. The primary endpoint of the study will be the safety and immune activity in peripheral blood and at the tumour level.
“We are excited to have initiated this study in patients with locally recurring RAS-mutated rectal cancer,” said Dr Magnus Jaderberg, chief medical officer at Targovax. “This will be the first time our TG02 immune activator will be tested in humans and, while the study’s primary objective is to study safety, we will also be looking at signs of anti-tumour immune activation, thus providing important mechanistic data not just for TG02 but for the entire TG technology platform. In addition, it will give us an indication on how this novel immunotherapy can be enhanced in combination with a checkpoint inhibitor.”
TG02 is the second TG cancer immune activator from the company’s peptide-based immunotherapy platform. It contains a proprietary mixture of eight synthetic peptides representing fragments of the most frequent RAS mutations seen in rectal cancer.
Targovax is a clinical stage company that develops immune-oncology therapies to target solid tumours.