Cancer
These phenomena result in classifying leukaemia in two main families, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) and Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML).
In terms of segmentation of market, Affichem has focused on AML which are much more frequent than ALL, particularly in patients over 60. Indeed, the average age of patients suffering from AML is approximately 67 years. The incidence of AML is relatively low before the age of 40, 1 case for 100.000 people but increases dramatically with the age to 15 cases for 100.000 people over 75.
AML are the most frequent Leukemia in adults and represent between 15 to 20% of the market in Europe and in the United States.
The first advantage of AF122 is its mechanism of action.
Indeed, AF122 activates the immune system whereas the other existing treatments cause more or less important aplasia which can be very dangerous.
The second advantage is that the preliminary data show an absence of toxicity on the healthy hematopoietic cells at the effective dose.
Lastly, AF122 showed on human cells a strong effectiveness against the leukemic progenitor cells, known to be responsible for the relapses.
These three factors make AF122 a new promising therapeutic hope, in particular for frail patients or in relapse.
AF122 : anti-cancer drug against breast cancer.
Like for other types of cancer, the treatment of breast cancer is more efficacious when it is diagnosed early. Continuous improvements in diagnostic methods, the number of women followed, particularly in cases of hereditary risk, improve each year the survival rate, which reached 79% this year in Europe. However, treatment with cytotoxic drugs induced resistance and hormonotherapy is not a universal response to breast cancer treatment. So there are opportunities for developing new therapies to complement the therapeutic arsenal for this indication.
As such, the AF122 is different from other drugs since it is an antitumor agent associated with efficacy in vivo and in vitro on breast cancer cells commonly used in laboratories and in vitro on cell lines resistant to reference treatment.
The clinical development of AF122 will therefore provide solutions to a therapeutic impasse.
Metastatic melanoma is a dreadful cancer of the skin. It represents 4% of all types of skin cancer but it is responsible for 77% of the deaths in this field. Its incidence doubles every 10 years and it is estimated that there are 160 000 new cases per year in the world. In spite of many years of research and some recent good results with B-Raf inhibitors in development, the current treatments offer limited efficacy and with significant side-effects.
When it is treated early, the disease requires only a minor surgical excision, but the metastatic stage of the disease represents a negative and dramatic evolution: more than 80% of the patients will die in the first year following the diagnosis of metastases and the 5-year survival is less than 10%.
Preclinical studies carried out by Affichem on different metastatic human cell lines, very aggressive and poorly immunogenic melanoma model (B16F10 cells) established the proof of concept of the efficacy of AF122 in vivo against tumor development and metastasis.
Indeed, the in vivo results obtained are in agreement with the in vitro data and validate the combined action of AF122 on the melanoma tumors and the immune system.