Howard Kaufman, MD, FACS, Ankyra Therapeutics and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, explains the rationale for intratumoral immunotherapy with aluminium hydroxide-tethered IL-12 and comments on results from pre-clinical studies evaluating this strategy. This method uses aluminium hydroxide as a scaffolding to attach immunostimulants such as IL-12, a cytokine which has been shown to have anti-tumor activity in both pre-clinical and clinical studies, but was not further developed as an immunotherapy due to high systemic toxicity. Early studies in mice have also shown that intratumoral immunotherapy with aluminium hydroxide-tethered IL-12 resulted in potent anti-tumor responses with minimal IL-12 leakage into the systemic circulation. This interview took place during the 36th Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
