Radiopharm strikes new blow in fighting aggressive tumours

An immune system protein being developed by Radiopharm Theranostics has for the first time been shown to have the potential to detect and target a specific cellular marker found in a wide range of cancers.

The company’s monoclonal antibody known as “DUNP19”, is a first-in-class therapy designed to track down, image and destroy cancer cells in human patients. Radiopharm says a new study at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) featuring DUNP19 has demonstrated how it can be used in various treatment models for the detection and targeting of cancers that include the marker, “LRRC15”.

The company’s antibody hunts down and targets LLRC15, which is found in solid tumours in the breast, head and neck, lung and pancreas, in addition to deadly cancers including osteosarcoma, glioblastoma and melanoma. Radiopharm says DUNP19 has the potential to be used not only for non-invasive imaging, but also for the treatment of cancers expressing the characteristic marker.

The UCLA study was led by Dr David Ulmert and his colleagues and their findings have now been revealed a newly-published paper. It says that non-invasive clinical imaging and targeted radioimmunotherapy with DUNP19 can halt tumour progression and prolong survival in various cancer models.

It also shows that the treatment may be able to override immunotherapy resistance in some solid tumours.

Radiopharm Theranostics scientific advisory board member and co-inventor of the DUNP19 platform Dr David Ulmert said: "Our transcriptomic analyses of 177Lu-DUNP19-treated tumours indicate a reduction in pro-tumorigenic mechanisms, including the TGFβ-driven LRRC15+ signature associated with resistance to immunotherapy. The findings underscore the potential of radio-theranostic targeting of LRRC15 as a powerful precision medicine platform.”

The company says it already has DUNP19 under pre-clinical investigation as a therapeutic monoclonal antibody labelled with the beta-emitting radio-isotope Terbium-161.

Transcriptomics is the study of the “transcriptome”, a term now widely understood to mean the complete set of all the ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules (called transcripts) that are expressed in cells, tissues, or organisms. The transforming growth factor-beta (TGFβ) is a secreted cytokine, which controls many physiological and pathological processes during development and carcinogenesis, which is the start of a cancer forming.

It is often described as “an excellent servant, but a bad master”.

Radiopharm calls DUNP19 “a pan-cancer targeting monoclonal antibody”, because it targets the characteristic marker (LRRC15) common to such a wide range of cancer types.

DUNP19 is now largely seen as a dual agent that can both detect and then hunt down and kill a cancer marker. But the longer-range view could also be that if the versatile therapy can be tagged with several other different radioisotopes, each enabling or possessing their own unique targeting capabilities, the entire range of possible therapies could be significantly increased.

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