What We Do
The human immune system has evolved to respond to microbes that threaten our lives. Like firefighters responding to a forest fire, immune cells expand to great numbers, become activated, and ready the tools for the job, waiting to be directed where to go.
Some microbes provoke greater and more durable responses than others, so much so that we evolved specific immune cells to profoundly and durably respond to them.
Laguna’s QUAIL platform based on such microbes is a sheep in wolf’s clothing – reversing the well-known parable, QUAIL has been modified to be harmless, incapable of causing infection or sickness, while still looking sufficiently alarming to our immune cells to provoke a large and durable response.
The resulting expanded and activated immune cells can then be directed to attack tumors alone or in combination with other immunotherapies that provide tumor-specific targeting.
How It Works
Making QUAIL Safe
Our QUAIL platform is built upon LADD, a microbe that has been safely administered to hundreds of cancer patients. We further modified LADD based on our deep understanding of microbiology to render it incapable of growing within a person so that it has no way of causing infection or sickness. QUAIL can only enter immune cells whose function is to consume and contain it. Once inside those cells, it cannot spread to other cells or escape into the body. These changes make QUAIL over 2,000-fold safer than its wild-type cousin.
Activating Immune Cells
The immune system has evolved exquisite control mechanisms so that it is only active when needed. These control mechanisms require the proper alignment of multiple, very specific ‘keys’ in order to unleash a powerful, robust, and durable response. Cancer cells have the ability to disrupt those keys, which allows tumors to grow and avoid detection by the immune system. Some therapies can align a single key, which is simply not enough to overcome the disruption that enables tumor growth. QUAIL is the only known solution that can align every required key in exactly the correct order and orientation in order to profoundly and durably activate a range of immune cell subsets and overcome the disruption that allows cancer cells to grow.
Killing Tumor Cells
QUAIL-activated immune cells can kill some types of cancer completely on their own. These cells activated by QUAIL have been shown to kill leukemias, lymphomas, multiple myeloma, sarcomas, and neuroblastoma. The primary challenge has been that no prior therapies have generated as many active immune cells as QUAIL.
Additionally, the immune cells activated by QUAIL can be targeted to countless other types of cancer with novel antibody therapies. There are many antibodies in development that engage with immune cells to target many different tumor types. QUAIL can combine with these antibodies to increase tumor cell killing and improve outcomes for patients with a wide range of diseases.
Pipeline
QUAIL can activate a range of immune cell subsets and treat a range of tumor types. LL-100 is our lead therapeutic based on QUAIL and is being evaluated across several indications with and without targeting.
