Genkyotex announced that setanaxib, the Company’s NOX1 and NOX4 inhibitor, was shown to significantly improve immunotherapy in multiple preclinical cancer models. Results from this preclinical study were published in Cancer Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. In this study, conducted by Professor Gareth Thomas and his colleagues at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, setanaxib was able to overcome immune cell exclusion and enhance response to multiple immunotherapies. Immune exclusion, the inability of effector T-cells to penetrate the tumor and kill cancer cells, is emerging as one of the key causes of resistance to immunotherapies such as checkpoint inhibitors, adoptive T-cell therapy, and therapeutic vaccines. This study showed that the exclusion effect is caused by activated cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs), making CAFs a promising therapeutic target, but as yet, there are no clinically available CAF-specific inhibitors. The Southampton team had previously identified the enzyme NOX4 as a key regulator of CAF activation in multiple solid cancers. In the present study, they tested the effect of setanaxib, Genkyotex’s NOX1 and NOX4 inhibitor, and found that it reverses CAF activation, overcomes immune exclusion and promotes infiltration of CD8+ T-cells into tumors. Importantly, setanaxib abolished treatment resistance and enhanced immunotherapeutic responses to anti-PD1 antibodies and therapeutic vaccination. This work is supported by a Small Molecule Drug Discovery grant from Cancer Research UK (CRUK) to evaluate the optimal clinical development strategy for setanaxib in oncology. Cancer Research UK is the world’s leading cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research. The objective of the funded program is to inform the design of a potential clinical trial of setanaxib in combination with an available immunotherapy. Cancer Research is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Association for Cancer Research. It covers research on all aspects of cancer and cancer-related biomedical sciences and was established in 1941. Its impact factor is 8.4.