Drug Name : Vaccine for Melanoma
PCI Biotech (OSE: PCIB), a cancer-focused biopharmaceutical company, announces that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted the company a US patent covering the use of fimaVacc in combination with cytokines.
Cytokines are small proteins that are involved in cell signaling, and that are very important in the immune system, modulating both cell-based and humoral immune responses. The combination of cytokines with PCI Biotech’s vaccine technology, fimaVacc, has been shown to be effective for enhancing cellular immune responses that are important for the effect of therapeutic vaccines. The now granted US patent gives broad coverage for the combination of various cytokines with the fimaVacc technology.
There are many vaccines under development utilising cytokines to elicit immune responses. The US patent granted today is important for PCI Biotech’s development strategy, as it supplements our ability to generate an internal future vaccine pipeline, in addition to bringing value for the fimaVacc technology in partnering efforts, said Per Walday, CEO of PCI Biotech.
As part of PCI Biotech’s strategy for applying the PCI-technology for therapeutic cancer vaccines, several global patent applications were filed in 2013 and 2014. Today’s granted US patent secure protection until 2035 and this patent application is still pending in Europe and key Asian markets.
About fimaVacc
This novel vaccine technology applies a unique mode of action, triggered endosomal release of antigens, to enhance the essential cytotoxic effect of therapeutic cancer vaccines and works in synergy with several other state-of-the-art vaccination technologies. The fimaVacc programme aims to enhance the cellular immune responses that are important for the therapeutic effect of vaccines, and the fimaVacc technology has proven excellent preclinical efficacy with protein- and peptide-based vaccines. The technology has shown particularly strong CD8 T-cell immune responses, which are important for therapeutic vaccination, as well as enhanced helper (CD4) T-cell and antibody responses.
PCI Biotech successfully translated the vaccination technology into humans through a Phase I study in healthy volunteers that was completed in May 2019. The study covered more than 90 subjects and established the tolerability of fimaVacc across a wide range of doses. The immune results provided proof-of-concept and demonstrates fimaVacc‘s potential to enhance overall T-cell responses, by demonstrating improvement of the immunogenicity of vaccines in healthy volunteers.
Effective induction of cytotoxic T-cells will be critical to realise the huge potential of therapeutic cancer vaccines, but vaccines often fail to generate such responses. Insufficient delivery of vaccine antigens to the appropriate presentation pathway in the immune cells may be one of the main reasons for weak cytotoxic T-cell responses. The fimaVacc technology has the potential to effectively enhance vaccine presentation through these pathways.
