UbiVac founder to open major cancer conference in Hong Kong
November 18, 2016
UbiVac founder to open major cancer conference in Hong Kong
Hong Kong, China.—UbiVac, www.ubivac.com, a private, clinical-stage immuno-oncology company whose lead product educates the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer, announces that its co-founder and CEO, Bernard A. Fox, PhD, will address the 21st Annual Scientific Symposium of the Hong Kong Cancer Institute on November 19th in Hong Kong.
Symposium participants include internationally recognized experts in immunotherapy from Europe, the USA and Asia. Dr. Fox will provide opening remarks with a lecture covering the biology of immunotherapy, cancer vaccines and immune checkpoint therapy.
He also will detail UbiVac’s DRibble immunotherapy (DPV-001), a first in class technology that combines more than 100 cancer targets, DAMPs and TLR agonist activity in a DC-targeted microvesicle. Ongoing Phase II clinical trials confirm that DRibble is novel and can help induce immunity against cancer.
Much of the symposium will focus on checkpoint therapy, biomarkers and combination strategies. Checkpoint therapy has provided a significant survival advantage over chemotherapy for a number of cancers. However, the majority of patients fail to obtain an objective response and ultimately progress and die of their disease.
It has been proposed that these patients either lack an anti-cancer immune response or have an immune response against a limited number of antigens, which the cancer cells can down-regulate and thus evade immune detection. UbiVac believes that by inducing immunity against a larger number of cancer antigens it will be more difficult for cancer to evade immune-mediated destruction.
Because DPV-001 induces and or boosts immunity against a large number of cancer antigens, UbiVac believes that its DRibble technology is the ideal companion for combination immunotherapy. It also is complimentary to the pipelines of major pharmaceutical companies developing immuno-oncology therapies. An ongoing, NCI-supported, randomized, multi-center Phase II clinical trial of DPV-001 is providing additional evaluation of its therapeutic effects.
According to Dr. Fox, UbiVac’s technology also is in a clinical trial for men with prostate cancer, and a trial for patients with breast cancer will open soon.
Award Number R44CA121612 from the National Cancer Institute supports the ongoing research and clinical trial of DPV-001.
Contact: Patricia Pearson, [email protected]
UbiVac is a clinical stage Immuno-Ongology company engaged in development of immunotherapies to combat cancer. UbiVac’s DPV-001 is currently in a Phase II randomized multi-center adjuvant study for non-small cell lung cancer. UbiVac has ongoing preclinical and discovery programs using DRibble, nanoparticles and spread-defective Cytomegalovirus (sdCMV). Founded in Portland, Ore. in 2005 by Drs. Bernard A. Fox and Hong Ming Hu, UbiVac is a spinout of the Robert W. Franz Cancer Research Center, Earle A. Chiles Research Institute at Providence Portland Medical Center. In 2011 UbiVac, in cooperation with Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), created UbiVac CMV to license sdCMV.