Cancer Vaccine ‘ImmuneFX’ in Phase 1 Trails

Phase 1 clinical trials for a ‘cancer vaccine’, ImmuneFX, are underway on patients with severe cutaneous melanoma.

This is the first time our vaccine has been tested in humans. We have provided vaccines for veterinarians for a number of years for treating naturally occurring cancers in dogs, cats and horses. It’s a small trial – six patients. But basically, we’re looking to see that the safety we saw in animals is now safe in humans, which we totally believe that it is. And then it’s sort of like the jumping off part for expanding this to different types of cancer and larger numbers of patients

Patricia Lawman, co-founder of Morphogenesis

The priming antigen, Emm55, is a serotyping protein normally expressed on the surface of the bacterium, Streptococcus pyogenes and is highly antigenic.

To create the vaccine, the gene encoding the Emm55 antigen is introduced into the patient’s autologous tumor cells in the form of DNA plasmid by in vitro transfection.

The successfully targeted tumor cells express the Emm55 antigen both intracellularly as well as on the surface of the cells, eliciting a targeted response from the bodies immune cells, and therefore killing the tumour.

In previous studies using dogs, ImmuneFx elicited a tumor-specific immune response (both humoral and cell mediated) – No dogs were harmed in the process of this study