CAR T, Targeted Therapies, Others as Treatment Options on the Horizon in NETs

Anna Greene, PhD, director of research at the Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Foundation (NETRF), highlighted in an interview with CancerNetwork®, up-and-coming research that was funded by NETRF. The focus of NETRF’s research program is on the most important basic and translational research.

NETRF funded preclinical work for a novel CAR T-cell immunotherapy targeting CDH17, which was developed at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, a phase 1/2 trial is underway, and initial results have shown that one neuroendocrine tumor (NET) patient achieved stabilized disease at 60 days. ¹ She also spoke about the uPAR target, which may help patients with higher-grade disease who do not respond to somatostatin-targeted therapies.²

Overall, the work the NETRF is doing is exciting, and she hopes to see these trials make significant progress to help provide more efficacious and targeted treatments for NETs.

Transcript:

We’re excited about all our projects. Like I said, we do pick our work strategically because we [only] have $2 million in funding. We want to be very passionate about the work we’re funding and so we’re excited to see how it progresses. We primarily fund basic and translational research, and we get excited when we see that work progress to the clinical research phase. I want to give a couple of examples of clinical trials that are now ongoing that resulted from the pre-clinical work that we funded.

One of those is a novel CAR T-cell immunotherapy where we funded pre-clinical work at the University of Pennsylvania for many years, and it’s finally made it to clinical trial. We’re very excited to see how this evolves. It’s a phase 1/2 trial that’s sponsored by Chimeric Therapeutics, and they recently reported that the first patient with NET was treated with this CAR T-cell immunotherapy, and this patient had progressive disease, but after the therapy, they now have stable disease at 60 days. These results are early, but we’re hopeful given that it’s stabilized disease, I think that’s an exciting outcome.

Another trial is focused on a target called uPAR. We funded some pre-clinical work in the space on this new target, uPAR. Our targeted therapies in NET cancer research are primarily targeting a peptide called somatostatin. There is a subset of our patient population that doesn’t express this, or they don’t highly express somatostatin, so they’re not eligible to take some of our more targeted treatments. This is an unmet need for this patient population. These are primarily patients who have a higher-grade disease, so it’s important that we find a way to treat them in a more targeted manner. There are some trials ongoing to look at this target, uPAR, which is found in these higher-grade NETs and neuroendocrine carcinomas. We’re excited to see if it can be a successful target for this patient population that doesn’t currently have a targeted treatment. We’re excited about that.

In general, we’re just excited about the work we fund. We’re waiting to see how it evolves. We do track outcomes on our projects because we think it’s important to tell our donor community where their money is going, so we provide a lot of updates on our projects to our community, and we’re very excited when they move into the clinical trial phase.

References

1. Eads JR, Morelli MP, Olson D, et al. A phase 1/2 study to evaluate CHM-2101, an autologous cadherin 17 (CDH17) chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy for the treatment of relapsed or refractory gastrointestinal cancers. J Clin Oncol. 2025;43(4). doi.10.1200/JCO.2025.43.4_suppl.TPS844
2. uPAR-targeted PRRT: new radionuclide-based therapy. Neuroendocrine Research Foundation. Accessed April 11, 2025. https://tinyurl.com/3jzk4hjw