Etubics, NCI partner to further develop therapeutic cancer vaccines

Both the entities will jointly work to further develop the Etubics Platform, which is employed to develop new immunotherapeutic product candidates to treat cancer.

As part of the CRADA, the two parties will collaborate on the preclinical and clinical development of a multi-targeted carcinoma immunotherapy.

The deal will see Etubics work with NCI Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology chief Dr Jeffrey Schlom and his team to expand the clinical development of its ETBX-011 immunotherapeutic for cancer by inserting two additional cancer targets to the ETBX-011 backbone, making a total of three targets in one delivery system.

The company said that one of the added targets is designed to prevent and/or target cancer metastasis while the second target is expressed in multiple human tumor types.

Recently, ETBX-011 was reported to provide colon and rectum cancer patients with beyond-predicted overall survival in a Phase I/II clinical trial.

Etubics chief medical officer Gerald Messerschmidt said: "We look forward to combining our expertise with the NCI to create a multipronged immune stimulatory treatment approach to cancer that we believe will allow a patient’s immune system to create a memory type response, similar to an influenza vaccine, thus prolonging the lives of cancer patients."

Etubics will manufacture the immunotherapeutic product candidates for use in the trials, while NCI will conduct Phase I and II clinical trials, with the potential to be involved in randomized Phase III studies.

The two parties will continue to perform preclinical trials to evaluate additional cancer targets to activate T cells against certain cancers and evaluate the immune responses of the patients treated under the CRADA.