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.

Laura Aguilar MD, PhD

Diakonos Oncology is currently 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 in a phase 1 clinical trial. Notably, data from this study are being presented at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, held May 30 to June 3, in Chicago, Illinois.

Shortly before the conference, CGTLive® spoke with Laura Aguilar MD, PhD, the chief medical officer of Diakonos Oncology, about the findings being presented, and more generally about the development plan for dubodencel, which is being assessed for other cancer types as well. Aguilar emphasized the potential of the DOC1021 platform to be applied to a wide variety of cancer types, but pointed out the need for effective funding to make that possible. She also touched on activities aimed at making the manufacturing for the product more efficient.

CGTLive: How would you summarize the big picture implications of the DOC1021 data presented at ASCO this year?

Laura Aguilar MD, PhD: Well, I think that unfortunately we've seen quite a few failures in glioblastoma and I think some of the reasons that that might be are that glioblastoma is very heterogeneous and it can become resistant to a lot of targeted therapies that target a single or a small number of pathways or small number of antigens because of the mutations that are happening, the evolution of this, and the fact that the tumor itself was heterogeneous to begin with. It's also a very immunosuppressive tumor and so trying to overcome that with a very potent immune stimulatory approach, I think is important. Also, sometimes a blood brain barrier can be a problem in glioblastoma, and we know that we're getting T-cells into the tumor, so we think that we've found a way with this approach—ultimately, what we want is T-cells to get to the tumor—but we want them to be reactive against the whole complement of tumor antigens that are in that patient's tumor, not just 1 or 2 that the tumor can easily evolve around.

The other thing is, although we're going forward with glioblastoma and we also have an ongoing phase 1 trial in pancreatic cancer and pancreatic adenocarcinoma at Baylor College of Medicine, we're also getting ready to start a refractory melanoma study where we feel like we'll be able to a little more easily and quickly interrogate the tumor response and correlate it with this immune response in a setting where the tumor is a little more accessible and there's a well-known pattern of disease evolution that we can compare to.

Are there any challenges with DOC1021 that still need to be worked out, or future plans that you can discuss?

The team is in the process of a very robust and active program to work on process development and make the process more efficient. We have a contract development and manufacturing organization in Houston that we're using for the phase 2 trial, and we are exploring ways to make this possible to use even less tumor and define really how many leukocytes we need from the leukapheresis so we're not taking more than we need. Those kind of things we're working through to make it better and more efficient.

Also, I think funding is always a limitation. 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 and the whole process for making the immunotherapy is a bit expensive, so trying to build those efficiencies in to get that cost down, and also more funding to be able to test this in more tumor indications will really allow it to, I think, reach its full potential.

Is there anything else you want to share?

I'm gearing up for ASCO, I'm really excited to see all the new things. I've worked in the brain tumor space for a long time, and I really applaud Diakonos for taking on this difficult challenge for the sake of patients that need something. This is a space that unfortunately is not the most popular space right now. I'm also on the board of the American Brain Tumor Association, and we need new treatments for this disease. There finally is a new drug on the market for brain tumors, but this is for low-grade tumors, which is great. But in the glioblastoma space there is nothing new. The last approved drug was in 2005. It's a space that needs novel, effective treatment approaches and I'm excited to share the news about this and the other indications as I talked about such as pancreatic cancer. We're not afraid of hard to treat cancers. Being able to interrogate the immune response more and more with new tools is also an exciting opportunity to really understand: Why do some patients respond better than others? And how can we make it better for all patients?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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