Specific Conjugation of Antibodies to Lipid Photo-peroxidised cancer tissues for their immunogenic ELimination

Cancer ranks as a major cause of death, with 3.4 million new incidences in 2020 in Europe. The current cancer standards of care include surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and, as of late, immunotherapy, none of which have met their expected therapeutic outcome yet. Photomedical treatments like photodynamic therapy of cancer (PDT) and Photochemical Internalisation (PCI) show great promise as effective anticancer treatments. Both are, however, limited by the cancer cells left behind, causing cancer recurrence and metastasis, after recovering from their sublethal membrane injuries. But what, if we could label these injured cancer cells with antibodies, thus activating the immune system to eradicate them? SCALPEL will utilize PDT or PCI to destroy the bulk of tumour cells while marking the remaining sub-lethally damaged cancer cells for destruction, by attaching antibodies to their membranes. Bespoke, modified SCALPEL components will be administered to all cells, normal and cancerous. Following local irradiation, only the photo-modified components will conjugate with our specially engineered antibodies, selectively flagging the cancer cells, for destruction. Moreover, the immune system will be trained through this process, against the specific cancers offering systemic immunity. The high risk/high gain nature of SCALPEL is counterbalanced by an avant-garde, multidisciplinary research team, covering photomedicine/photobiology, immunology, synthetic chemistry, porphyrin chemistry and protein engineering. SCALPEL is expected to revolutionize oncology by offering a pioneering photoimmunotherapy with curative potential. In this project, we strive to provide a proof-of-principle of the proposed technology in cell cultures, but also in laboratory animals, with the long term-vision of establishing SCALPEL as a clinical cancer modality.