IMMUNOTOPE VACCINE TO BE EVALUATED IN CANCER TRIAL

Immunotope has submitted an investigational new drug application (IND) to the FDA in collaboration with Duke University to initiate a Phase I ovarian cancer clinical trial.

The trial will evaluate safety and immune response to Immunotope's proprietary multi-peptide OPCM immunotherapeutic vaccine. This will be the first-ever cancer vaccine clinical trial to use a cocktail of novel peptide antigens to treat ovarian cancer.

Immunotope's vaccine consists of peptides derived from twelve different proteins essential to tumor survival, growth and metastasis and is designed to elicit an immune response to cancer cells that remain in the body after surgery and chemotherapy, enabling the patient's own immune system to detect and destroy residual tumor cells and to prevent cancer recurrence. In preclinical studies, cytotoxic T cell responses were generated to all of the vaccine component peptides. In addition, the cytotoxic T cells activated against each of these peptides recognized a panel of different ovarian tumor cell lines but did not recognize normal ovary cells. Several of these peptides are also presented by MHC molecules on multiple other tumor types, indicating the broad potential to use these peptides for immunotherapy treatment of other forms of cancer.