Biologics

Cancer Immunotherapeutic
Their ability to replicate viral forms in a non-infective way suggests that PREPS and L-particles provide a novel, safe, and versatile vehicle for vaccination in both humans, and animals.

It is now well established that CD8+ T cells play a central role in the eradication of infected cells and tumours. To be therapeutically effective against tumour cells it would be necessary to induce cytotoxic T lymphocytes to tumour epitopes. Cancer of the cervix for example expresses the E6 and E7 oncoproteins at all stages of tumor progression from HPV infection to carcinoma, and are therefore ideal targets for activated T-cells for immunotherapy. Engineering E7 proteins into the PREPS particles should enable the E7 protein to induce specific E7 CTL responses. Using other VLPs (not PREPS) this has been successfully undertaken by other workers producing chimeric VLPs expressing the E7 protein, leading to the prevention of the outgrowth of E7 tumor expressing cells.

The other major advantage of PREPS and L-particles over other virus vectors and VLP’s is the ability of the particle to express more than one antigen simultaneously. This is important as many cancer cells have antigens that are not uniformly expressed and that may change as a tumour progresses- the ability to target an immune response at different antigens simultaneously could help overcome this problem.

Working with world leading experts in the field (see News) pre-clinical studies are ongoing in this very important field.

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