The Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) recently embarked on the first year of its Breakthrough Engineering and Advanced Treatment (BEAT) Cancer Initiative—a collaboration with the OSF Healthcare Cancer Institute (OSF) in Peoria, IL. This project aims to facilitate an unprecedented level of collaboration between medical and scientific communities, ensuring faster translation of medical discovery from the lab benches at Illinois to a patient’s bedside at OSF.

One of these five BEAT Cancer grants was awarded to one of the CCIL’s long time clinician scientists Dr. Timothy Fan (ACPP/CGD), in collaboration with OSF surgeon Dr. Richard Anderson. Fan and Anderson’s grant focuses on immunotherapy, utilizing a special inflammatory protein called a cytokine, specifically interleukin-12, to elicit immune system activity against tumor cells, while minimizing the likelihood of harmful toxicity associated with systemic cytokine therapies.

“We are clinically evaluating a technological platform licensed by Ankyra Therapeutics  and Jenga Biosciences that allows us to directly inject potent cytokines like interleukin-12 into tumors. Based upon novel protein engineering strategies, this platform keeps these cytokines within the tumors, stimulating immune activation while reducing systemic toxicity,” reported Fan. “If you have many of these inflammatory proteins in your body, you can get off-target immune side effects, sometimes severe. The protein engineered platform we’re using retains cytokines within that tumor to minimize toxicity.”

This platform aims to “educate immune cells to be able to attack cancers at further away places in the body, which is known as metastasis,” said Fan. “If we can reproducibly do that with this technology, it would be a game changer. You could fight that tumor locally, but at the same time reap the benefits of eliciting and mounting an effective immune response against cancer that’s spread inside your body.”

In addition to his roles with the CCIL’s BEAT Cancer Initiative, Fan also serves as the CCIL’s Associate Director for Translational Research and Development. Fan is also a professor of Veterinary Clinical Medicine, working with the IGB in the Anticancer Discovery Pets to People theme, which was co-founded by chemist Paul Hergenrother and Fan. This experience working with cancer in pet dogs as both a lead scientist and clinical veterinarian has provided Fan with valuable insight regarding the safety and efficacy of the injectable cytokine platform, pushing it forward to an ongoing human phase I clinical trial (NCT06171750).

“What we saw in the pet dogs with cancer, which were treated with this immunotherapy, has paved the way to understand and guide what we’re seeing in people who are treated with the same type of immunotherapy,” said Fan. Fan elaborated on his experience as both a veterinarian and a clinical scientist: “The ability to have conversations and understanding with physicians as well as basic scientists lends itself very well to serve as a bridge to try to bring people together, to work towards a common goal of improving cancer outcomes.”

Fan hopes this technology will continue to encourage physicians at OSF and other local medical institutions to engage in immunotherapeutic strategies, allowing for continual development in human and veterinary medicine. “This is a great way for the Cancer Center at Illinois to interface with a deeply invested clinical partner in OSF,” said Fan, highlighting the importance of this collaboration.

Timothy Fan is the Associate Director of Translational Research and Development, as well as a Professor of Clinical Veterinary Medicine. Dr. Fan also serves as a principal investigator for the Comparative Oncology Research Laboratory.

The article “Cytokine Therapy” is available online at https://www.ucir.org/therapies/cytokine-therapy.