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Our Products
The table below summarizes the status of our product candidates.
| Product Candidate |
Target Indication |
Status |
| Cellular Immunotherapy |
|
|
ICT-107
(cancer antigen vaccine) |
Glioblastoma |
Phase I ongoing |
ICT-111
(cancer stem cell antigen vaccine) |
Glioblastoma and other cancers |
Pre-clinical |
| Monoclonal Antibodies |
|
|
ICT-109
(Monoclonal Antibody) |
Lung and pancreatic cancer therapeutic |
Pre-clinical |
| ICT-037 (Monoclonal Antibody) |
Colon, ovarian, multiple myeloma therapeutic
and diagnostic |
Pre-clinical |
| ICT-Diagnostic-SCLC |
Diagnostic/Prognostic for small cell lung cancer |
Pre-clinical |
We are focused on developing new therapeutics to fight cancer using the immune system. Our product pipeline includes cellular immunotherapies targeting brain cancer and monoclonal antibodies to diagnose and treat several different cancers.
Dendritic Cell Based Cancer Vaccine
Dendritic cells are critical facilitators of a T cell response but are often not present in sufficient numbers and are often not aggressive enough against malignant tumors to permit an adequately potent immune response to fight cancer. Dendritic cell therapy generally involves harvesting dendritic cells from a patient, then culturing and processing them in a laboratory to produce more numerous and effective dendritic cells. In the laboratory, the dendritic cells are cultured with specific tumor antigens to enable the dendritic cells to recognize cancer cells as targets for attack. When the newly cultured dendritic cells are injected back into the patient, they seek out remaining tumor cells and signal the T cells to destroy them.
Dr. John Yu, our Chief Scientific Officer and Director of Surgical Neuro-Oncology at the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai, has previously demonstrated safety and biological efficacy in generating specific anti-tumor T cell responses in two clinical trials of patients with intracranial tumors using a dendritic cell-based vaccine. Based upon some additional pre-clinical research, Dr. Yu and his Cedars-Sinai team have developed what could be a new, improved dendritic cell-based therapeutic vaccine (ICT-107) which is currently the subject of the Phase I clinical trial that we are conducting. ICT-107 consists of a number of specific tumor antigens which, when loaded onto the dendritic cells, are expected to stimulate the body’s T cells to target only these specific proteins on the patient’s tumor cells. This product candidate is an intradermal dendritic cell-based therapeutic vaccine that we plan to use with chemotherapy concomitantly or subsequent to conventional therapy in patients with newly diagnosed or recurrent glioblastoma.
Cancer Stem Cell Therapeutics for Brain and Other Cancers
The characterization of cancer stem cells from glioblastoma has provided an opportunity to study the etiology of this dreaded disease and to be engaged in the development of product candidates that would be able to target the cancer stem cells which are believed to be responsible for the initiation and maintenance of glioblastoma. We are conducting pre-clinical research for a vaccine that could kill glioblastoma cancer stem cells and expect to be in a position to file an Investigational New Drug (IND) application with the FDA before the end of 2008 to begin a Phase 1 clinical trial.
Antibody ImmunoTherapy
The second strategy for our product development, which is in preclinical development, is to harness the other arm of the adaptive immune system, which uses antibodies that can bind and neutralize any foreign antigen. In February 2008, we acquired a platform technology called DIAAD (Differential Immunization for Antigen and Antibody Discovery) and several monoclonal antibody candidates targeting cancer from Molecular Discoveries LLC. DIAAD is a platform technology that allows potentially rapid discovery of targets (antigens) and monoclonal antibodies for diagnosis and treatment of diverse human diseases, specifically cancer. DIAAD utilizes immunological tolerization to accelerate the discovery of the molecular differences between diseased cells and their normal counterparts enabling us to develop antibodies that selectively bind to cancer cells and not normal cells. The monoclonal antibodies produced by DIAAD provide the basis for the discovery and development of our potential diagnostic and therapeutic products.
The monoclonal antibodies we acquired from Molecular Discoveries have been created to recognize certain antigens primarily expressed on cancer cells and not expressed on normal cells, such that binding to those antigens can lead to death of the tumor cells. The antibody candidates that we acquired bind to certain tumor antigens which may be useful for the potential detection and treatment of multiple myeloma, small cell lung, pancreatic and ovarian cancers.
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