The Power of Personalized Cancer Treatment: How BriaCell Is Making Immunotherapy Accessible

Receiving a cancer diagnosis is a devastating moment in anyone’s life. It’s one that’s typically filled with seemingly endless doctor’s appointments and long waits for answers. Even then, options are often limited and may take time to customize to one’s personal cancer journey.

Personalized cancer treatment targets the specific makeup of the cancer, creating customized treatments that attack the cancer’s weaknesses. Bria-OTS™ and Bria-OTS+™ is an innovative option within the field, offering an off-the-shelf option for personalized immunotherapy.

What Is Personalized Cancer Treatment?

Personalized cancer treatment uses immunotherapy to target the specific cancer cells in the body while sparing the healthy cells. It’s tailored to work with each patient’s genetics as well as the tumor profile to create a targeted treatment.

Through this groundbreaking approach, the treatment works with the body’s immune system, causing it to destroy the invading cancer cells using the body’s own natural line of defense. Personalizing immunotherapy to the cancer patient and the tumor makes it much more precise and versatile while allowing the treatment to adapt and evolve with the cancer, which should reduce cancer cell resistance.

Traditional cancer treatments, meanwhile, take a one-size-fits-all approach. Those cancer treatments kill a wide range of cells, even healthy ones. Cancer cell resistance is also a common problem with traditional cancer therapies. Cancer cells can mutate (i.e. change), making it difficult for traditional methods to eliminate hard-to-treat tumors.

Personalized cancer treatments seem like the logical choice, but they come with some drawbacks. Existing personalized therapies are often complex and take time to develop. They’re also costly, which can put them out of reach of many cancer patients. Bria-OTS+™ combines the personalization of immunotherapy with an off-the-shelf product, making it faster and more cost-effective than previous immunotherapy options.

How Bria-OTS+™ Works: The Role of HLA-Matching

The key to what makes Bria-OTS+™ different is HLA-matching. HLA stands for human leukocyte antigen. You can think of it as an ID tag for an individual’s cells. It’s a protein that most cells have, and it’s an important marker for a person’s immune system to know which cells should be in the person’s body.

There are a variety of different HLA types. Knowing what type of HLA a person has is important for using Bria-OTS+™. A simple saliva test is all it takes to identify a person’s HLA type and get a match with a personalized, off-the-shelf immunotherapy from Bria-OTS+™.

The platform of off-the-shelf immunotherapies that make up Bria-OTS+™ consists of four independent cell lines. They’re engineered to express 15 different HLA types, which makes matching much easier. In fact, Bria-OTS+™ offers a matched treatment for over 99% of patients.

The “Off-the-Shelf” Advantage

Speed is what sets personalized off-the-shelf therapy like Bria-OTS+™ apart from other existing treatments. The personalized immunotherapy is ready to use yet is still personalized based on a patient’s HLA type. These genetically engineered cancer cell vaccines can then target the specific cancer cells in the patient’s body.

With Bria-OTS+™, the process is quick and simple and can take less than a week:

  1. Saliva test
  2. Identification of cell types
  3. Selection of the correct Bria-OTS™ formulation
  4. Treatment

Meanwhile, the traditional method of personalizing immunotherapy can take weeks or even months, depending on the complexity. That’s valuable time that could be used for treatment. Bria-OTS+™ eliminates the long wait because the product is already manufactured and ready for use immediately.

Promising Early Signs

Bria-OTS™ is currently in an ongoing Phase 1/2 bucket trial, which initially started with using Bria-BRES™ for breast cancer. The trial is being extended to prostate cancer, lung cancer, and eventually other types of cancer. From this clinical trial, there have been some early promising clinical results, including tumor shrinkage.

One patient with metastatic breast cancer experienced a complete resolution of a breast cancer tumor in the lung (a.k.a. metastasis). That 100% resolution remains after six months.

These are only the early results of the clinical trial. The Phase 1/2 trial of Bria-OTS™ / Bria-OTS+™ is ongoing, so additional results will continue to come in as the trial progresses.

Bria-OTS+™ Offers A New Approach to Personalized Cancer Treatment

With Bria-OTS+™, patients receive personalized immunotherapies that target and kill cancer cells without the long wait of traditional immunotherapy treatments. Instead of waiting for weeks or months, Bria-OTS+™ offers a personalized off-the-shelf (i.e. premanufactured) solution that’s ready as soon as the results of the HLA matching test is available. It’s an accessible treatment option that is often more affordable than other personalized immunotherapies (for example CAR-T therapies).

BriaCell is committed to transforming care for cancer patients with its innovative immunotherapies. It is BriaCell’s goal to fight cancer while improving patients’ lives, giving them safer options with more effective treatment options. Learn more about our clinical trials to see if you or someone you know would be eligible to participate in BriaCell clinical trials.