How CAN-3110 Works to Treat Glioblastoma

After being given months to live following a 2021 diagnosis of glioblastoma, Kyle Donahue enrolled in a groundbreaking clinical trial at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Massachusetts, and is now a five-year survivor of brain cancer.

CURE sat down for interviews with Kyle Donahue and her husband, Jim, as well as Dr. E. Antonio Chiocca, Chair of Brigham's Department of Neurosurgery and lead researcher on the clinical trial.

In a news released in October 2025, Candel Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, announced interim data from the ongoing phase 1b clinical trial of CAN-3110 (linoserpaturev) in recurrent glioblastoma, which was also published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

In the first installment of a multi-part series, CURE sat down with Chiocca to discuss the clinical trial that Kyle Donahue enrolled in, and to learn how CAN-3110 works to treat glioblastoma.

Transcript

CURE: After surgery, what was Kyle’s path to this clinical trial?

Chiocca: She underwent the regular radiation, chemotherapy treatments, and then it looked like she recurred, the tumor came back, and that's when she entered our clinical trial.

Can you please describe what the clinical trial was investigating?

This is the clinical trial of our oncolytic biologic and it's basically based on a virus. It's based on the herpes virus, which causes the common cold sore, but we engineered in the lab so that it will particularly target only tumor cells in the brain and kill them.

Can you tell me more about that?

So, the way this works is the virus, by killing the tumor cells in the brain, sets up an inflammatory reaction. The problem with these tumors is they evade the immune system, so it sets up an inflammatory reaction, and that tends to wake up our own immune cells to come in and try to get rid of the tumor. And by doing that, by doing this inflammatory reaction, by getting rid of the tumor, it's almost like a vaccine sets up a durable, long-term response.

Now, the layperson's way of describing this, that I always describe to patients, is to think of your brain as your home. Think of these tumors as a thief that comes into your room and disables the alarm. Therefore, the police do not know that the thief is in the brain, as in your police are actually your immune cells. These are the cells of your immune system that reject pathogens like viruses and tumors. But the thief, the tumor, has basically disabled the alarm. So now, we're going to, when we inject the virus, think of the virus as the alarm going off. Maybe it's your neighbor that calls the police and says there's somebody there. So that's what the virus is. It kind of like makes the alarm go off in the tumor, and all of a sudden, your immune cells wake up and say, “Oh, wow, there's a thief. Let's go in there and let's scour the brain to find the thief.” And that's what these T cells, these immune cells, do. They come in and they find these viruses that have infected tumor cells, and as they wipe these out, they also start wiping out other tumor cells.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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