Although immunotherapies for patients with solid tumors such as melanoma can be dramatically successful, the majority of patients are resistant and require alternative treatments. While the cytokine interleukin-12 is well known for potentiating the effect of immunotherapies, such as checkpoint blockade, it couldn’t be used because of toxicity.

At the 2023 AACR-NCI-EORTC International Conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics, Jun Ishihara, PhD, a lecturer at London’s Imperial College reported on a protein bioengineering approach in which IL/12 is bound to collagen from the extracellular matrix of the tumor. This targets the cytokine’s action to operate specifically on cancer while hopefully avoiding most of the off-target toxicities previously observed with unbound IL/12. 

After the conference, OncTimesTalk’s Peter Goodwin called to see him at his London laboratory.