S.F. nonprofit to lead trial for cancer therapy
The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, the San Francisco nonprofit created in 2016 with $250 million from the billionaire former Facebook executive who helped build Napster, will sponsor its first clinical trial — an immunotherapy treatment for late-stage pancreatic cancer, the group plans to announce Wednesday.
The trial will combine traditional chemotherapy that is already commonly used for patients with pancreatic cancer with two immunotherapy agents: an antibody that can prompt the immune system to destroy cancer cells, and the drug nivolumab, which helps the antibody work more effectively.
It is one of three clinical trials that the Parker Institute is helping to fund, but the first that it is sponsoring — meaning it will oversee the trial and is responsible for sharing the data with health regulators.
The trial will start with 20 to 25 patients to ensure safety, then expand to 100 patients, targeting those whose cancer is inoperable and metastatic. It is jointly funded by the Parker Institute, pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Cancer Research Institute.
“There hasn’t been much success in pancreatic cancer. It’s very difficult to treat,” said Dr. Ramy Ibrahim, an oncologist and vice president of clinical development at the Parker Institute. “We felt we should prioritize tumor types where there aren’t that many treatment options available to patients and there’s a high medical need.”
Pancreatic cancer is expected to be the third most prevalent cause of cancer deaths in the United States in 2017, after lung and colorectal cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. It has one of the lowest survival rates of any major cancer, with 8 percent of patients surviving five years or more after being diagnosed.
The $250 million contribution from Parker, a billionaire who was the first president of Facebook, is believed to be the single largest contribution to immunotherapy research. The institute is also funding a melanoma trial and a study on whether the gene-editing tool CRISPR can be used to help create immunotherapy treatments for melanoma, sarcoma and multiple myeloma.
The Parker Institute partners with the nation’s six top cancer research centers — UCSF, Stanford, UCLA, Memorial Sloan Kettering, the University of Pennsylvania and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center — as well as drug manufacturers and biotech firms to advance immunotherapy research.
The antibody used in the pancreatic cancer trial is made by the San Carlos biopharmaceutical startup Apexigen; the second immunotherapy agent is made by Bristol-Myers Squibb.