CancerVAX, Inc., developer of a breakthrough universal cancer vaccine that uses the body’s immune system to fight cancer, today reports that after nearly a year of research, the UCLA team is ready to begin integrating their combined work into a complete vaccine construct for next phase testing and optimization.
In mid-2022, CancerVAX entered into a Sponsored Research Agreement with UCLA to develop a universal cancer vaccine (UCV) that can precisely detect, mark and kill cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells intact. This novel approach is comprised of three distinct parts:
– DETECT – Dr. Christopher Seet is leading a research program to overcome the shortcomings of existing cancer vaccines that target a single natural tumor marker (i.e. neoantigen), by using multiple signals for detecting cancer cells to enable high precision targeting. Dr. Seet’s team has completed their in-vitro experiments and has selected two candidate strategies for incorporating into a complete universal cancer vaccine profile.
– MARK – Dr. Satiro De Oliveira is leading a research program to create the recipe and genetic instructions to force cancer cells to do one of three things: (1) attract more of the body’s natural immune cells to the cancer cell, like “bees to honey”; (2) force cancer cells express markers that look like known diseases, such as COVID or tetanus, so existing immunizations can be used to kill cancer cells; or (3) express a completely novel non-natural biomarker allowing modern vaccine technologies to easily target them. Dr. Oliveira’s team has candidate strategies for all three approaches to be incorporated into a complete universal cancer vaccine construct.
– KILL – Dr. Steven Jonas is leading a team to develop an advanced lipid nanoparticle that contains all the “DETECT” and “MARK” mechanisms to enable the killing of cancer cells. Dr. Jonas’s team has completed numerous experiments and has selected one strong lipid nanoparticle candidate for integrating the various pieces into a complete prototype vaccine that can be injected for in-vivo mouse studies and optimization.
Byron Elton, Chief Marketing Officer of CancerVAX, described the UCV in simple terms, “Our UCV is not a pharmaceutical chemical compound. It is a next generation immune based vaccine technology that we believe can be programmed to hunt down cancer cells, uniquely mark and kill them. This concept is inspired by the recent clinical successes of single disease cancer vaccines, such as those being developed by Pfizer and Moderna. More importantly, it was inspired by the global success of the COVID vaccine, which was developed in record time, manufactured at record low costs, and distributed at record scale, and restarted a halted global economy, all within 2 years. The COVID vaccine relied heavily on lipid nanoparticle and messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, both of which we are leveraging in the development of our universal cancer vaccine.”
Ryan Davies, CEO of CancerVAX commented, “According to the World Health Organization, 13.9 billion COVID vaccines were administered globally. The CDC reports that over 81% of Americans have received the COVID vaccine. This clearly demonstrates the efficiency of lipid nanoparticles and immune-based strategies to fight diseases. This is an extraordinary development. We feel so privileged to be working with UCLA, one of the top cancer research and treatment institutions in the world, to develop our novel cancer vaccine.”
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