GENEREX PUBLISHES PRECLINICAL MELANOMA TRIAL DATA

Generex Biotechnology announced the publication of a paper in the cancer research publication, Journal of Immunotherapy. The paper reports a late preclinical step in validating a novel melanoma vaccine for clinical trials. Parallel peptides containing MHC class II epitopes of the HER-2/neu antigen are in trials with patients with breast cancer.

The model uses a special type of mouse in which human antigenic epitope presenting molecules have been introduced genetically, with suppression of the comparable mouse molecules. By these means, the mice more closely model the human immunological situation.

Many vaccine peptides have been developed for stimulation of patients' cytotoxic T lymphocytes to kill cancer cells. However, clinical trials with such vaccine peptides do not demonstrate particularly robust results. The reason for this lack of potency stems in part from the fact that those vaccine peptides do not boost T helper cells, which up-regulate the cytotoxic T lymphocytes and provide long-term immunological memory.