Overview
Cancer remains one of the world’s most significant diseases. A key challenge in the fight against cancer is that many tumours continue to grow by successfully evading the body’s own natural defence mechanism - the immune system. Scancell’s mission is to overcome this breach in our defences by developing products that stimulate the immune system to treat or prevent cancer.
The company, which was founded in 1997 as a spin-out from the University of Nottingham, has secured £6.2million funding to date. In December 2006 Scancell sold its pipeline of direct killing monoclonal antibodies to Arana Therapeutics, an Australian biopharmaceutical company. The deal enhanced the prospects of Scancell’s lead antibodies reaching the clinic and allowed Scancell to focus its efforts entirely on its innovative ImmunoBody® cancer vaccine programme.
Scancell’s first clinical candidate drug , SCIB1, is a DNA vaccine which is being developed for the treatment of melanoma. It is scheduled to enter clinical trials in late 2009. SCIB2 is a vaccine in preclinical development that targets tumour vasculture.
In September 2008 Scancell became a public company following admission to the UK PLUS stock exchange.
This unique and patented vaccine technology overcomes the present limitations of many therapeutic vaccines. In essence, an ImmunoBody® is a human antibody that acts as a vector that can deliver information about a foreign agent or pathogen (this might be a tumour or an infecting agent) to dendritic cells. Dendritic cells use this information to activate an immunological cascade resulting in the production of helper and cytotoxic T-cells directed against the target of interest (i.e. the tumour or the infecting agent). This is termed ‘cellular immunity’, which alongside antibody production (known as ‘humoral immunity’), forms the basis of the body’s immune defence system. Although it is relatively easy to produce a humoral immune response with a vaccine, the holy grail for many years has been to find a way of producing a complete cellular immune response (involving the stimulation of both helper and cytotoxic T-cells). The ImmunoBody® technology addresses this issue.
© Scancell Limited, 2001-2007.
