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Our Technology
Cancer is caused by abnormal cells that grow in an uncontrolled manner. These cells proliferate and metastasize throughout the body causing tumors which can lead to organ failure and death. Currently available treatments have limited therapeutic effects and significant undesirable side effects. Our approach is to harness the body's immune system to provide therapeutics with the ability to fight cancer.
There are two arms of the adaptive immune system that provide natural protection to the body: the cellular immune system (T-cell based) and the humoral immune system (B-cell based), which uses antibodies to fight foreign invaders. Our strategy is to utilize both of these mechanisms in our product development programs. We believe that the synergy between the two types of immunity can be powerful. Eliciting a cellular immune response has the potential to provide long term protection against malignant diseases, while infusing monoclonal antibodies (concentrated product of the humoral response) has the capacity to confer an immediate shield against the disease. The latter is especially important in cases where the patient's immune system is compromised due to toxic treatment of the disease and cannot mount an adequate response to the active vaccine.
Cellular ImmunoTherapy
One of our product strategies is the development of cell-based vaccine products that could bolster the body's natural tendency through its immune system to defend it against malignant brain tumors. Dendritic cells are key immune system cells that trigger the systems that help the body fight infection or foreign bodies by recognizing, processing and presenting foreign antigens to T cells, which then effectuate the immune response.
The goal of a cell-based vaccine is to (1) make use of and enhance the dendritic cell's ability to trigger the T cell response and (2) to stimulate the dendritic cell to focus the T cell response to specifically target the cancer cells for destruction.
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.
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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