Candel Therapeutics, Inc. announced the presentation of a poster during the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, taking place April 5 through 10 in San Diego, which focused on a first-in-class multimodal immunotherapy candidate for induction of tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS), being developed as a novel therapeutic strategy for solid tumors from Candel's enLIGHTEN?? Discovery Platform. TLSs are ectopic lymphocyte aggregation structures found in the tumor microenvironment and their induction could potentially improve anti-tumor immunity.

The presentation describes the development of an investigational TLS-inducing multimodal therapeutic using the enLIGHTEN? Discovery Platform. The enLIGHTEN?

Advanced Analytics suite was applied to immune checkpoint inhibitor-treated patient datasets, and the predicted payload components included factors regulating the development of TLS. Delivery of two unique in silico predicted payload combinations, using an enLIGHTEN? programmable vector, resulted in TLS induction, monotherapy anti-tumoral activity, and enhanced responses in combination with anti-PD-1 antibody therapy in mouse models of solid tumors.