L19TNFα in Patients With Advanced Solid Tumors

The primary purpose of this Phase I/II study is to define a safe and potentially active treatment regimen of L19TNFα as a monotherapy and to evaluate the antitumor activity of this regimen in relapsed metastatic colorectal cancer subjects, for whom standard treatment options are exhausted. L19TNFα is an investigational drug that specifically and effectively binds to ED-B, which is abundantly expressed in cancer tissue. Accordingly, treatment should result in a high and long-lasting intratumoral accumulation of biologically active rh-TNFα. Although combined therapies of TNFα with cytotoxic drugs (e.g. melphalan) seem to be strikingly more active against sarcoma and melanoma than with TNFα alone - at least for the ILP setting it seems possible that the repeated intratumoral delivery of TNFα via L19TNFα might produce additional biologic effects, such as the induction of an immunologic antitumor response or the sustained inhibition of tumor-associated angiogenesis (Lejeune, 2006), that potentially could benefit advanced cancer subjects.