Feb 17, 2025

Jay Hartenbach, the President and COO of Diakonos Oncology, is developing a dendritic cell therapy to treat late-stage and aggressive cancers like glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer. This approach uses the patient's cells and tumor tissue to generate a personalized treatment. The resulting vaccination tricks the immune system to attack cancer cells by making them look like a virus which the immune system knows how to eliminate.

Jay explains, "Our vaccine works by using something called a dendritic cell from the patient. And so the dendritic cell is what we like to think of as the master of the immune system and somewhat the general that directs immune responses against threats, whether a bacterial threat or a viral, fungal threat, whatever it may be. The dendritic cell sits on top of the immune hierarchy. So, we take a patient's dendritic cell, and we also take a sample of that patient's tumor. We replicate effectively a viral infection with those tumor-derived antigens, the tumor-derived specific genetic material."

"By mimicking how a virus would infect those dendritic cells with the specific tumor antigens, we're able to trick the body into thinking that the cancer cells are virally infected cells. And from there, the body's good at eliminating those cells because we've all fought viruses before, and we're all standing and walking around and alive today. We just take over or hijack into that immune response except instead of killing infected cells, the body is now targeting those cancer cells." 

#Diakonos #Vaccines #Cancer #Oncology #Glioblastoma #PancreaticCancer #Tumors #DendriticCells

diakonosoncology.com

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