ImmunoBody^® Vaccines

Scancell has developed the ImmunoBody® vaccine platform to overcome the present limitations of many therapeutic vaccines. This novel invention has been patent protected and is being utilised to develop products for the treatment of cancer and infectious disease. ImmunoBody® products are based upon the use of a human monoclonal antibody or a fusion protein as a vector to target dendritic cells that are essential in stimulating cellular immune responses. Due to the unique modular design of the ImmunoBody®, the stimulus delivered can be customised to make an effective immune response against a specific disease and a specific patient population.

The competitive advantage of Scancell’s ImmunoBody® technology lies in its ability to simultaneously activate both a cytotoxic and helper T cell immune response. The technology can be adapted for the treatment of any disease type by incorporating appropriate epitopes into the ImmunoBody®. IB technology has the capability to avoid the issue of patient specificity that is a concern with any dendritic cell vaccine or adoptive immunotherapy regime. The non immunogenic antibody framework overcomes the concerns associated with generation of vector specific immune responses that are common in viral vaccines such as pox viruses or adenoviruses. It has the ability to target multiple antigens and HLA-types simultaneously and has the capability to overcome the problem of regulatory T cells that often occurs when whole antigen immunogens are used.

Scancell’s ImmunoBody® Products

Scancell is currently developing two key Immunobody® products.

SCIB 1 (Melanoma)

SCIB1 is a humanized monoclonal antibody engineered to express TRP-2 and gp100 CTL epitopes, and other helper epitopes. Upon DNA immunisation with SCIB1, mice generated substantial epitope specific CTL responses to tumour antigen compared to peptide or whole antigen immunised mice. More importantly these responses were high avidity and capable of tumour cell lysis in vitro and in vivo. Abrogation of T cell responses by removal of the Fc region from the ImmunoBody demonstrated its importance in the induction of anti-tumour responses. Several studies have shown that dendritic cell based, xenogeneic DNA and adenovirus vaccines targeting TRP-2 can elicit anti-tumour effects in vivo. Our study also demonstrated this and all immunised mice with no signs of disease exhibited vitiligo-like depigmentation of fur at the site of immunisation. Previously vitiligo is often associated with tumour protection in mice and has been highly correlated with successful IL-2 immunotherapy in patients with metastatic melanoma.

SCIB 2 Is a vaccine that stimulates cytotoxic T cells that recognise and preferentially kill tumour vasculature. There are a number of advantages in generating cytotoxic lymphocytes (CTL) to target tumour endothelium and not tumour cells directly.

• The vessels themselves are readily accessible to T cells
• Unlike epithelial tumour cells there are unlikely to be any antigen loss variants.
• As angiogenesis is required for the growth of all solid tumours an endothelial vaccine would be applicable to a number of cancers.
• Destruction of some but not all of the endothelial cells will result in loss of vessel integrity.

 

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