Conventional cancer therapies are often insufficient

Traditional cancer therapies, such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, are often insufficient in treating patients and usually cause severe side effects. Still, only about half of all cancer patients are cured from their disease. Immune therapy, which triggers the immune system to destroy harmful substances, has shown promise as an alternative effective treatment method with less negative side effects. The immune system recognizes and attacks that which is foreign to the body, but the problem with cancer is that tumor cells are not considered unknown invaders. This makes it difficult for the immune system to effectively neutralize tumor cells which is why several methods have been developed, mainly with cellular vaccines, for enhancing the immunological response against cancer.

Dendritic cells are vital in all immune responses

Dendritic cells (DCs) can be derived from immature white blood cells and are the most important players in all immune responses since they trigger T-cells to eliminate infectious agents or any other harmful foreign material. DCs process antigens and present them to T-cells, whose job it is to attack cells that have been invaded by infectious agents. DCs have been described as the most potent and efficient antigen presenting cells capable of activating both resting and naïve T-cells. Naïve T-cells “learn” to respond to new dangerous substances by being presented to antigens that are specific for the harmful substances. In this way, the immune system also learns how to attack cancer cells, instead of regarding them as harmless cells. Once DCs are activated, they migrate to the draining lymph nodes where they interact with naïve T-cells and trigger the immune system.

Autologous DC cancer vaccines are drawn with problems

It is common knowledge that DCs from one human being injected into another (allogeneic DCs) as foreign material will be eliminated by the host’s immune system. Thus, allogeneic DCs have generally been considered useless as vaccine cells and research has been focused on activating and loading the cancer patients’ own (autologous) DCs with tumor antigens in vitro. However, this artificial DC preparation in vitro seems to be insufficient since only about 0.5 - 4 % of re-injected autologous DCs are able to migrate to the draining lymph nodes for activation of the immune system. Furthermore, since autologous DC cancer vaccines have to be tailor made for each individual patient there are several other drawbacks. Creating a new, unique vaccine for each patient is:

• Complex
• Time consuming
• Expensive
• Physically stressful for the sick patients

Immunicum's vaccine concept is based on allogeneic DCs

Immunicum develops an allogeneic DC cancer vaccine that activates the immune system for effective destruction of tumor cells and inhibition of future tumor growth. White blood cells from healthy donors are loaded with tumor specific antigens in vitro and treated with the enzyme neuraminidase. Since the vaccine cells can be loaded with different antigens, it is possible to tailor the vaccines for prophylactic and therapeutic treatment of all types of cancers as well as of infectious diseases such as HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. However, at the moment, Immunicum has not yet verified the potential of using its vaccine concept on infectious diseases. 

Immunicum takes advantage of the fact that allogeneic DCs will be regarded as foreign material once injected into another human being. In this way they are capable of functioning as superb adjuvants for stimulation of the immune system against cancer. As foreign invaders, allogeneic DCs will create a highly inflammatory milieu at the vaccination site, containing many substances that are capable of recruiting the patient’s own monocytes and subsequently also capable of maturing these into highly activated DCs. The patient’s recruited DCs will then engulf the invading allogeneic vaccine cells and in this way become loaded with tumor specific antigens. Thus, the inflammation that allogeneic DCs superiorly induce is used to recruit, activate, and load the patient’s own DCs with tumor antigens in vivo (in human) instead of artificially in vitro. This “natural” activation better prepares the patient’s own DCs for migration to the draining lymph nodes where they can trigger the immune system against cancer.

Advantages of allogeneic DC-based vaccines

Even though it is yet to be proven in clinical trials, in vitro tests clearly indicate superior activation of the immune system using Immunicum's vaccine concept. Furthermore, the vaccine can easily be thawed and injected into the patients directly after diagnosis, which gives a simple vaccination procedure that can be performed in public and private health care centers.

Since Immunicum’s vaccine does not have to be individually prepared for each specific patient, it also allows for large scale production with subsequent lower manufacturing costs. In addition, the vaccine can be frozen and shipped across great distances, which further enhances its commercial viability.