Pulmobiotics receives 1.9m euros to develop ‘living medicine’ for lung cancer

Researchers at Pulmobiotics, a start-up founded in 2020 at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, have begun work on a ‘living medicine’ to improve the efficacy of lung cancer treatment. The research proposal has been selected by the European Innovation Council and will be supported with 1.9 million euros of funding.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. There are different types of lung cancer, with non-small-cell carcinomas representing 80-85% of cases. These types of cancers are grouped together because their treatment and prognoses are often similar.

In recent years, a class of drugs known as immune checkpoint inhibitors have become standard of care for treating non-small-cell carcinomas. These drugs are a type of immunotherapy, a treatment that uses the body’s natural immune system to eliminate cancer cells. They block the action of proteins called immune checkpoints, which normally keep the human immune response from being too strong; when these proteins are blocked on immune cells such as T-cells, it frees them to attack cancer.

Despite the effectiveness of immune checkpoint inhibitors, they don’t work for every patient and their toxicity can cause serious side effects. Patients with advanced non-small-cell carcinomas often fail to respond to the treatment or develop resistance only after a few months, leading to disease recurrence. Less than 25% of patients survive beyond a five-year period.

Researchers at Pulmobiotics plan to overcome resistance to immunotherapies in lung cancer by combining it with a ‘living medicine’, a treatment that consists of a modified bacterium repurposed to activate the immune system in and around the tumour.

Conventional drugs that treat tumours often also target healthy cells and tissues. Unlike these treatments, a ‘living medicine’ can be engineered to travel straight to the disease site, where it can set up shop like a temporary factory, producing a variety of therapeutic molecules.

The researchers believe that this ability for local and sustained production could be key to improving the efficacy of lung cancer treatments. Their ‘living medicine’ will produce molecules that would normally be too toxic if used throughout the body, but that when produced locally stimulate the accumulation of immune cells in the tumour without affecting healthy tissues.

The researchers will develop the treatment by modifying Mycoplasma pneumoniae, a species of bacteria that is naturally adapted to the lung. Different strains of this bacterium have previously been shown highly-effective in treating antibiotic-resistant bacteria on the surface of medical implants.

The development of this treatment is one of twenty proposals selected in the latest round of the European Innovation Council’s Transition Challenges, which altogether will receive 45 million euros of funding. The EIC Transition scheme will support Pulmobiotics to mature and validate their breakthrough technology and to build a business case for future commercialisation.

EIC Transition projects support further development of promising results generated by EU-funded projects, including the European Research Council’s Proof of Concept grants. The current work is based on a Proof of Concept grant awarded to Dr. Luis Serrano, Director of the CRG and Dr. María Lluch, Chief Science Officer at Pulmobiotics, both of whom are co-founders of the company.