Laura Aguilar, MD, PhD, on the Potential to Apply Immunotherapy DOC1021 to a Broad Array of Tumor Types

This is the second part of an interview with Laura Aguilar MD, PhD. For the first part, click here.

“This could be used for any tumor where we can get a tumor sample and a patient can undergo a leukapheresis procedure to give us their peripheral blood cells. There's a huge opportunity here for a platform technology that could really benefit a lot of patients with a lot of different tumor types. Needing to do a separate trial for each tumor indication is expensive. More funding to be able to test this in more tumor indications will really allow it to, I think, reach its full potential.”

At the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, held May 30 to June 3, in Chicago, Illinois, Diakonos Oncology is presenting data from a phase 1 clinical trial evaluating dubodencel (also known as DOC1021), an investigational autologous dendritic cell immunotherapy made from patients’ own tumor cells and peripheral blood mononuclear cells, for the treatment of gliobastoma. Notably, the results showed that the immunotherapy was well tolerated across all 4 dose levels tested and an 88% 12-month survival rate was observed for a group of newly diagnosed patients (n = 16), which was notably higher than what would be expected for the patient population with standard of care treatment.

Shortly before the conference, CGTLive® held a discussion with Laura Aguilar MD, PhD, the chief medical officer of Diakonos Oncology, about the results. In the context of this conversation, Aguilar also went over the broader implications of the new data, and discussed potential future plans to apply the DOC1021 platform to a broader range of tumor types. Aguilar pointed out that a separate phase 1 clinical trial for the immunotherapy is already ongoing at Baylor College of Medicine in pancreatic cancer and pancreatic adenocarcinoma and that Diakonos is getting ready for an additional trial in refractory melanoma. She also touched on how work is currently being done aimed at making the manufacturing process for DOC1021 more efficient.

Click here to view more coverage of ASCO's 2025 Meeting.