THE WISTAR INSTITUTE and Cormorant Pharmaceuticals AB, a Swedish biopharmaceutical company specializing in cancer drug development, formed a partnership involving Cormorant’s novel drug HuMax-IL8, which is undergoing a phase I trial at NCI.
“Wistar’s biomarker analysis of the tumor samples will be instrumental in determining the effects of HuMax-IL8 on tumor immunosuppression,” said Maarten de Château, CEO of Cormorant.
The lab of Dmitry Gabrilovich, the Christopher M. Davis Professor and program leader in Wistar’s Tumor Immunology Program, has focused research efforts on abnormalities in the function of various myeloid suppressor cells. Gabrilovich and his colleagues have developed and validated a biomarker that will show if a tumor is inhibiting the immune system’s response to the tumor by targeting the migration of myeloid cells to tumor tissues.
“This partnership provides us with the opportunity to assess the clinical utility of our new detection method of myeloid-derived suppressor cells in tumors,” said Gabrilovich. “The evaluation of these cells directly in tumors is critically important for understanding the effect of the novel therapy developed by Cormorant.”
