"It's a bedside or ambulatory treatment. This is unheard of because we have a turnaround needle-to-needle time of less than 24 hours" for the reinfusion of a patient's own cells, invIOs' CEO Peter Llewellyn-Davies told ScienceBoard.net at the 2022 Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) International Convention in San Diego.

The invIOs EPiC cell therapy platform, which is designed to inhibit the immune checkpoint Casitas B-lineage lymphoma proto-oncogene b (Cbl-b), is currently being used for the company's lead cell therapy in a multicenter phase I clinical trial, while other candidates are in pre-clinical development.

Apeiron, now invIOs, first showed in clinical studies that Cbl-b silencing could reactivate immune cells in patients with advanced tumors. The trials used the proprietary small interfering RNA (siRNA) method to silence Cbl-b in patient-derived peripheral blood mononuclear cells.

Llewellyn-Davies noted that programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) "is the traditional checkpoint inhibitor" but Cbl-b "has come into the news recently because people are beginning to realize that it does play a central role in the cell and does actually do things to tell the killer cells not to kill cancer cells."

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