Pathios Therapeutics receives £350k to accelerate immunotherapy work

Biotech company Pathios Therapeutics has received a £350,000 grant from Innovate UK to help accelerate its cancer immunotherapy programme.

The company will put the funding towards its work targeting the innate immune checkpoint, GPR65, to treat melanoma which is resisting other forms of therapy. Pathios will collaborate on this project with researchers from the Department of Oncology at The University of Oxford to develop the tools required to enable the rapid translation of small-molecule GPR65 inhibitors for treatment-resistant melanoma.

Improvement in long-term survival for patients with melanoma has been helped through the advent of immunotherapy agents targeting T-cell checkpoints including PD-1 and CTLA-4. Unfortunately, only certain patients receive an ongoing benefit from these treatments, with researchers now trying it identify additional therapies for the remaining non-responsive population. Research suggests that some melanoma patients don’t respond well to anti-PD-1 therapies due to the disarming of innate immune cells called tumour-associated macrophages (TAMs), caused by the acidic microenvironment of advanced tumours. Activating the pH-sensing receptor, GPR65 on TAMS can lead to the suppression of a host of pro-inflammatory genes, changing the characteristics of these cells from immune-stimulating to immunosuppressive.

Pathios is working on a ‘Macrophage Condition’ approach which looks to deploy small-molecule GPR65 inhibitors pH-dependent immunosuppressive signalling in the vast majority of patients who do not carry this genetic change. The company will use the grant to develop tools to expedite the translation of small molecule GPR65 inhibitors for use in cancer immunotherapy. This will include the development of early clinical target engagement biomarkers as well as employing a range of bioinformatics techniques to identify those patients most likely to benefit from Pathios’ GPR65-targeted approach.

Stuart Hughes, chief executive officer of Pathios: "We are delighted to have secured this highly competitive funding from Innovate UK to accelerate our programme against GPR65 and to continue to build our scientific links with cancer researchers at The University of Oxford. This award boosts our ongoing programme and is a significant endorsement of our novel approach to targeting the innate immune system in hard-to-treat cancers. We look forward to developing the tools that will drive forward our GPR65-based ‘Macrophage Conditioning’ technology and help deliver on the company’s goal to provide a first-in-class treatment approach for those melanoma patients who currently have limited treatment options".