Massachusetts company MiNK Therapeutics working to make chemotherapy a thing of the past
BOSTON – A Massachusetts company is working on new technology that it says could make chemotherapy a thing of the past.
The Society of Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) is the leading global conference focused on cancer research and treatment and this year it was held in Boston.
Dr. Jennifer Buell is the CEO of MiNK Therapeutics and presented the company's revolutionary research and treatment at SITC. MiNK has offices in Boston and Lexington.
Dr. Buell said her company found a way to enhance immunotherapy for people with different cancers or respiratory diseases.
"When you can tune the immune system, it does the job of eliminating disease so effectively," Buell said. "Tumors put breaks on your immune system, and you can shut those down and see curative benefits for patients with cancer."
The way Buell explained it, the body has two main arms of immunity. NK cells are innate, or natural fighting cells. T cells adapt to your body's needs. But NKT cells are a combination of them and are very potent but extremely rare.
Dr. Buell said her company has found a way to extract those NKT cells from health human donors and duplicate them for sick patients.
"What we have been able to do is isolate these from healthy individuals and transplant them," she said. "And then we can scale that so we can treat 5,000 people with a single donor."
MiNK said it can extract NKT cells close to their purest form, over 99% pure, allowing them to perform clean reproductions.
"It was a major advance to be able to get to these cells and to be able to scale and create medicines out of them," said Buell. "Now delivering these cells and seeing the benefit. We can deliver them safely alone; we can deliver them to patients in the intensive care unit. We can see that the cells get into lung tissue and have very important features when they do. And for patients with a lung infection, they suppress pro-inflammatory cytokines."
Early clinical trials showed that when NKT cells were tailored to specific diseases, they had a 27% chance of reducing a tumor. But when NKT cells were paired with another immunotherapy, like Keytruda, efficacy jumped to 66%.
MiNK said one of the biggest benefits of pursuing this kind of treatment is that immunotherapy is designed to only target diseased cells. Compare that to chemotherapy which often cells healthy cells and can cause significant side effects.
"I think we are going to see a world essentially without chemotherapy soon," said Buell. "That is a measure of this conference being in Boston."
