An Introduction to Cancer Vaccines Ltd
Cancer Vaccines Ltd is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialisation of safe and effective therapeutic vaccines for the treatment of cancer. The company was founded in 1999 and won a DTI SMART Award.
The attraction of a vaccination based approach to treating cancer is widely acknowledged, and many researchers and clinicians have worked in this area. Historically the approach was based on the injection of cellular preparations displaying antigens associated with but not necessarily unique to the cancer being treated.
The founders of Cancer Vaccines Ltd (CVL) were the first to identify the power of combining a cell-based vaccine with the targeting of the antigens generated by the cancer-causing genes of the target cancers. This approach was granted patent protection in the USA in 2001 and patents are currently pending in Europe and Japan.
Clinical trials with a prototype of the Company's first product demonstrate safety and the generation of appropriate immune responses in the trial patients.
The CVL approach is cheaper to produce than many other cellular vaccines, standardised (i.e. is not specific to each individual patient) and suitable for treating large numbers of patients. It offers the opportunity to rapidly develop a family of products addressing multiple markets.
The Company's primary technology platform is broad and several products have been identified for development, in addition to a number of opportunities for licensing out aspects of the technology. Opportunities for partnering the Company's own products will be sought, particularly, but not exclusively, when products are at a later stage/in phase II trials.
CVL are currently working with a number of university and biotechnology groups around Europe to raise funding for phase I / II clinical trials of their approach, initially targeting acute myeloid leukaemia (product CV07) and lung cancer (product CV09).