Candel Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:CADL) CEO Dr Paul Peter Tak talked with Proactive about the encouraging results from the phase 2 trial of its investigational medicine CAN-2409 for borderline resectable pancreatic cancer.
Dr Tak shared that the median overall survival in the active treatment group reached 31.4 months, compared to just 12.5 months in the control group, showing a clear separation of survival curves. Three out of seven patients in the treatment group remained alive after prolonged follow-up, with two patients surpassing five years.
He emphasized the potential breakthrough this treatment represents for patients who often face poor prognoses, as typical survival rates for this cancer type are usually 6 to 12 months.
Proactive: All right. Welcome back inside our proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Dr Paul Peter Tak, the CEO of Candel Therapeutics. And Dr Tak, it's great to see you again. How are you?
Paul Peter Tak: Thank you very much. Great to be here. We are very well. We are very excited, for our patients, about the data that we presented today.
The data you had out, for your phase 2 trial, really leaps off the page when you hear extended survival in pancreatic cancer. Because, as we know, people get pancreatic cancer is basically a death sentence. But here's something that's a bit of light shining on this. So let's take a step back and talk to everyone a little bit about what's going on here. What this trial was trying to do?
Yeah, this randomized controlled clinical trial was focused on patients with borderline resectable pancreatic cancer. So this phase is typically about having a tumor that invades a blood vessel, and therefore they cannot undergo surgery yet. These patients will get chemotherapy followed by chemoradiation as standard of care. The goal is to shrink the tumor so that the patients may become operable, which is the case in about half of the patients.
All our patients received the same standard of care. But then the active treatment group received 2 to 3 administrations of our investigational medicine, which is CAN-2409.
So, Dr Tak, the numbers that you put out here, in the group that the median overall survival rate of 31.4 months. Just before we went on, I want to tell people what you said. You said it even surprised me, and I've been in this field a long time. Tell me a bit about the results that you saw. This seems quite interesting.
Yeah, it's very interesting. The median overall survival in the active treatment group is 31.4 months, compared to only 12.5 months in the control group. Very clear separation of the overall survival curves.
But the interesting thing is, if you look at the patients who are still alive in the active treatment group, we have three out of seven who were still alive after prolonged follow-up, actually two patients more than five years now.
This is very, very long. Two of these three patients had actually progressive disease after surgery, so they had stage four metastatic disease. One patient is still alive after a very prolonged follow-up. The other patient had a residual tumor, and even with some tumor left behind, this patient is still alive after more than five years.
We know that that does not happen in the normal clinical course of the disease. These patients typically live less than 6 to 12 months with normal routine care.
So Dr Tak, how should we be, just in layman's terms, how should the general public be looking at this and where this goes now?
We believe this is a potential breakthrough in the treatment of borderline resectable pancreatic cancer. The next step is to confirm this in a large randomized controlled clinical trial, which will have a design quite similar to the current trial.
We hope this will ultimately lead to approval from the FDA. We already have fast track designation and orphan drug designation, which will help us accelerate development. If everything goes well and if approved in the future, then we will probably also test it in other stages of pancreatic cancer.
Dr Tak, lastly, I mentioned you've been in this field for a long time. Can you talk to me about when you see results like this and that word we throw around a lot called hope in what is literally a family-shattering disease of pancreatic cancer? As a doctor, what does that make you feel like?
Well, this reminds us every day why we are in this business, working day and night to really be on the frontier of cutting-edge science in the field of oncology to help patients with the largest unmet need.
If we can really change their life with a good quality of life and they live longer, as we've shown here with the overall survival data, that is an enormous motivation. That's why we are doing this. At the same time, we believe this is how we will create value for all of our shareholders and all the people involved, including our employees.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style