Antibody-drug conjugates have transformed cancer treatment, but the ones used against lung cancer carry a serious, often fatal side effect: interstitial lung disease. Peptide-functionalized LNPs offer an intriguing alternative; they are far less immunogenic, faster and cheaper to produce, and lack the structures thought to bring on ILD in these patients.
Glioblastomas are among the most deadly cancers due in large part to how they interact with healthy tissue at the tumor margin. They tend to be highly infiltrative, extending cancerous projections far into healthy tissue. This makes complete clean resection by a neurosurgeon essentially impossible in most cases. Here I present data exploring a mechanism that may contribute to this effect, as well as data on a peptide I generated against glypican 5 that dampens crucial drivers of this effect.