Candel Therapeutics' Lead Candidate CAN-2409 Battles Lung, Pancreatic, and Prostate Cancers

Immunotherapy has transformed the way cancer is treated, but just 20% to 40% of patients typically respond to FDA-approved immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatments. Poor ICI treatment response has been linked to the tumor’s ability to disguise antigen presentation and generate an immunosuppressive microenvironment. Amid this landscape, Candel Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: CADL), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, has developed a new multimodal biological approach leveraging viral gene constructs to activate cancer-killing mechanisms, resulting in vaccination against the tumor while inhibiting the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Their lead product candidate, CAN-2409, is being studied in lung, pancreatic and prostate cancers. CAN-2409 is an off-the-shelf replication-defective adenovirus designed to induce an individualized, systemic immune response against the patient’s own tumor. The company has recently released very encouraging data for CAN-2409’s ability to improve overall survival in non-metastatic pancreatic cancer, with topline overall survival data in non-small cell lung cancer planned for this quarter (Q2 2024) and results from the prostate clinical trials later this year (Q4 2024).