IFx Primes the Activation of Immune Response to Target Cancer Cells
Our IFx Personalized Cancer Vaccine technology is designed to overcome primary resistance to CPIs by making cancer cells look like bacteria, triggering an innate immune response.
Some personalized cancer vaccines being developed by others require tumor tissue from each individual patient, followed by extensive molecular processing and computational modeling in an attempt to predict which foreign or neoantigens are important to activate an immune response. Typically, only 30 or 40 neoantigens, among the tens of thousands in each patient’s tumor, are targeted using an mRNA construct that is specific to an individual patient. This complex process is expensive, time consuming and does not take full advantage of all of the neoantigens in a patient’s tumor.
In contrast, our IFx technology involves a simple injection into the patient’s tumor of a proprietary gene that encodes for emm55, an immunogenic bacterial protein that is then expressed on the surface of the tumor cell. Recognizing the bacterial protein as being foreign, the patient’s immune system is activated, “ingesting” the tumor cell. This process educates the immune system to all the patient’s tumor’s neoantigens, not just a few dozen predicted to be important.
Directly injecting IFx-Hu2.0 into the tumor ensures that emm55 is expressed by tumor cells, initiating an immune response directed against the tumor antigens contained within the patient’s tumor cells.
Our approach provides a potent, multivalent, and systemic response against all of the patient’s tumor sites, not just the ones that were injected, through a process called primary epitope spreading.
Our IFx personalized cancer vaccine can be used across a number of cancer indications and is initially being developed as a first line treatment for metastatic Merkel Cell Carcinoma.
