About CVac™

CVac™ cell therapy or cancer vaccine is a novel investigational technology for the treatment of cancer. It is believed to act by stimulating the production of immune cells, produced naturally in the body, that attack cancer cells. It has been designed for use as a maintenance therapy after chemotherapy.

How does CVac™ cell therapy work?

The CVac™ product consists of an adjuvant, the so-called "mannan", a string of modified mannose (a sugar) units created with mucin-1 and your dendritic cells cultured from your immune system. This is a new paradigm in cancer treatment as it looks to prime the immune system and reactivate the natural tumor killer cells inside your body.

In a process called "apheresis", dendritic cells (DCs) or immune cells, are removed from the blood in a single out-patient procedure. Their duty in the body is to "present" antigens to cells whose purpose is to seek out abnormal cells and destroy them. These cells, called T cells, play a central role in policing the body for abnormal cells, including tumor cells. After expanding the cell number in test tubes from approximately 10,000 DCs to 200-600 million DCs, mucin-1-MFP is added. This consists of a protein that can be found in cancer cells, mucin-1, and the "mannan". Together they form a "mannan fusion protein" (MFP) highly effective at stimulating and activating T cells against cells producing excess amounts of mucin-1, for example ovarian cancer cells. The processed DCs are then injected back into the patient's skin to activate the T-Cells and provide a cancer vaccine response.





What are the key benefits of CVac™?

To date, there is no approved maintenance therapy following induction chemotherapy regimens.

CVac™ cell therapy uses the strengths of the patient's own immune system to fight cancer without the immunosuppression observed with other Cell Therapies. Unlike many chemotherapeutic agents, CVac™ has shown very few side effects to date and is generally considered non-toxic. The CVac™ target, mucin-1, is highly expressed by a range of cancers that may be treatable with CVac™.