Werewolf touts ‘Full Moon Moments’ in trial recruitment push

Werewolf Therapeutics is transforming its brand awareness and clinical trial recruitment efforts with a new campaign. The “Full Moon Moments” initiative, which launched amid May’s Skin Cancer Awareness Month and National Cancer Research Month, highlights the “transformational” moments in people’s lives, and specifically those that can happen when a cancer treatment starts working. The idea for the campaign came about as Werewolf was brainstorming how to raise awareness of the company, its molecules currently in development and “some transformational results that we’ve had in patients who are relapsed/refractory to standard of care,” according to Randi Isaacs, M.D., Werewolf’s chief medical officer. “You look at Werewolf: The werewolf transforms. What happens is you have something benign—and that is like our molecules, which are benign in the periphery and then become activated in the tumor microenvironment—become, I don’t want to call them killers, but they basically are there to kill the tumor,” Isaacs said in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing. “And all of a sudden it came to us that it’s a bit like a ‘full moon moment’ when people have responses to therapy and hadn’t had any responses previously,” she said. Werewolf recorded one such moment earlier this year, when it announced that a patient with skin cancer had been in remission for over a year after being treated in a clinical trial with the company’s investigational therapy WTX-124, a conditionally activated interleukin-2 (IL-2) treatment. In addition to—and as a product of—raising awareness of Werewolf’s work and the company as a whole among patients, advocacy organizations and the broader medical community, the campaign is also aimed at driving more participants toward Werewolf’s clinical trials. “There’s always information out there about clinical trials, but to get a little bit more specific about certain types of cancer and where there’s novel therapies and where there’s initial data, it’s always beneficial, we think, to be able to provide an additional avenue of information to help patients understand where they can go to access those novel therapies,” Werewolf CEO Dan Hicklin, Ph.D., said in the interview. The company is currently conducting trials of WTX-124 and WTX-330, a conditionally activated interleukin-12 (IL-12) treatment. Both therapies, termed Indukine molecules by Werewolf, were developed using its Predator protein engineering platform and aim to eliminate the immune toxicities typically associated with cytokines like IL-2 and IL-12, activating the immune system only to attack tumors. As Hicklin summed it up, Werewolf’s overarching goal is “to make very powerful drugs more tolerable and direct them in a targeted fashion to a patient’s tumors.” As part of the campaign, Werewolf will dive further into its science in a soon-to-be-released four-part video series. The videos will feature the principal investigator of the WTX-124 trial and a member of the Werewolf team, who will discuss the Indukine molecules, the impacts of clinical research and the patient journey. Additionally, this month, Werewolf plans to share educational resources with dermatology practices located near open clinical trial sites.