Dr Bernard Fox Joins CCFDIE Immunotherapy Workshop to Talk UbiVac's Combination Immunotherapy for Advanced Breast Cancer

China Center for Food and Drug International Exchange hosts International Immunotherapy Experts to Discuss State-of-Art and Future Treatments for Cancer

Date: October 17, 2020

BEIJING, CHINA, -- UbiVac Inc’s co-founder and CEO, Bernard A. Fox, PhD, joined luminaries and regulatory experts to present work from UbiVac and colleagues at the Chiles Research Institute, during the opening session of the China Center for Food and Drug International Exchange (CCFDIE) Cancer Immunotherapy Workshop held 16-17 October in Beijing, China. Other speakers that joined Dr. Fox in the session included Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, Surgery Branch, NCI, NIH; Dr. Lieping Chen, Yale School of Medicine; Dr Ke Liu, CBER, FDA,; Dr. Janis Taube, Johns Hopkins Medical University; Dr. Elsa Anagnostou, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center; and Dr. Gary Nolan, Stanford University Medical School

There is good News for the majority of patients with cancer whose tumor's have a low number of mutations. Dr. Fox reviewed published peer-reviewed preclinical and human data from investigators at MD Anderson, the US National Cancer Institute, Stanford, and the Earle A. Chiles Research Institute documenting the development of anti-cancer T cell responses to shared, non-mutated, cancer antigens as well as associations with response to treatment. Dr. Fox explained how these findings from leading groups offer good news and hope for patients whose cancers have low tumor mutational burden (TMB). 

Dr. Fox explained how UbiVac’s DRibble Platform Vaccine (DPV) technology enriches for proteins that make up the dominant cancer antigens presented on the surface of cancer cells. He showed results from UbiVac’s phase I/II study of vaccination as adjuvant treatment for definitively treated non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) where vaccination with UbiVac’s DPV-001 induced immune responses to a wide spectrum of shared cancer antigens. He also showed that many cancer antigens recognized by two or more vaccinated patients were against genes whose expression was associated with reduced survival. The association of these genes with reduced survival, he noted, underscores the importance of targeting these shared antigens with UbiVac's vaccine.

Dr. Fox also noted the failure of clinical trials for advanced cancer that relied on vaccines as the only treatment and presented data from Dr. Hong-Ming Hu, UbiVac’s co-Founder and CSO, showing how combining UbiVac’s vaccine technology with anti-OX40 significantly increased survival in a difficult to treat model of breast cancer. These data led to the development of a first-in-human combination immunotherapy trial that is now open at three sites in the USA and combines UbiVac’s DPV-001 off-the-shelf cancer vaccine, with anti-OX40 and anti-PD-1 as treatment for women with advanced triple negative breast cancer. 

Award Number R44CA121612 from the National Cancer Institute, NIH, supported the research and clinical trial of DPV-001 as adjuvant treatment for patients with NSCLC. That trial characterized DPV-001’s safety profile, drug formulation and ability to induce immune responses to a broad spectrum of shared cancer antigens, thus providing the proof of concept for additional trials. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

UbiVac is a privately held, clinical stage immunotherapy company engaged in the research and development of therapeutic vaccines to combat cancer. With innovative, first-in-class platform technology that couples an off-the-shelf DC-targeted cancer vaccine with more than 100 cancer antigens for most adenocarcinomas and squamous cell cancers, plus multiple TLR/NOD agonists and DAMPs that are effective at inducing anti-cancer immune responses. UbiVac believes that DPV-001 is highly complementary to current and developing immunotherapy, chemotherapy and small molecule drug portfolios. UbiVac also has a pipeline of vaccines under development to prevent cancer in patients at high risk of developing disease and for those that have failed to respond to anti-PD-1/anti-PD-L1. Founded by Dr. Bernard A. Fox, Dr. Hong-Ming Hu and Mr. Bernard A. Fox, III, in Portland, Oregon in 2005, UbiVac is a spinout of the Robert W. Franz Cancer Center, Earle A. Chiles Research Institute at Providence Portland Medical Center.

UbiVac is currently raising equity funding from accredited investors to advance combination immunotherapy strategies. This includes innovative trials for men with advanced prostate cancer and other diseases where standard immunotherapy combinations have failed. More information about the offering can be found at www.ubivac.com/investors.

UbiVac
[email protected]
Visit us on social media:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

There is a new paradigm for combating cancer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GTKYbP5fEA