On March 26, 2020 EpiVax Oncology, Inc., a precision cancer immunotherapy company, reported it has reduced the timeline from biopsy to vaccine to under 4 weeks for its personalized neoantigen therapeutic cancer vaccines (Press release, EpiVax, MAR 26, 2020, View Source [SID1234555884]).

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CEO and Co-Founder, Gad Berdugo, MSc Eng., MBA, stated, "This is a real game changer for personalized cancer vaccines. It will enable our precision immunotherapy to treat patients in the neoadjuvant clinical setting before surgical removal of their tumors, potentially improving the patient’s clinical outcome."

Dominique Bridon, PhD, CTO said, "Personalized cancer vaccines are created based on information obtained from an individual’s tumor. Previously, the process to create an a personalized vaccine starting from tumor biopsy took at least 12 to 18 weeks. We expect that reducing this time to less than 4 weeks will improve the effectiveness of our personalized vaccine candidates in attacking the tumor."

Arjun Balar, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Director Genitourinary Medical Oncology Program, NYU Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center, NYU Langone Health said, "The ability to generate a vaccine that is ready for use in a patient in under 4 weeks is a critical advancement. Patients with metastatic disease cannot wait for effective therapy. Moreover, a rapid biopsy to vaccine administration time opens the door to presurgical or neoadjuvant "window of opportunity" studies. These studies will definitively address the biological effects of a personalized cancer vaccine in the tumor-microenviornment. This is something that has long been missing in previous approaches to cancer vaccines."

Gary D Steinberg, MD, Professor of Urology, Director Bladder Cancer program, NYU Langone Health stated, "High grade bladder cancer is an aggressive disease that will progress and metastasize to other parts of the body. Thus, therapeutic interventions need to be provided in a timely fashion without unnecessary delay. With a personalized cancer vaccine process under 4 weeks, we can safely create a vaccine to treat all stages of aggressive cancer including in the neoadjuvant, adjuvant and metastatic setting. Ideally, we will also be able to treat patients with high grade non-muscle invasive cancer. This is a significant advance in the armamentarium of newly developed treatments for this cancer which kills over 17,000 people per year in the US."

Epivax Oncology’s neopeptides are patient specific peptides that are designed using Ancer: EpiVax Oncology’s advanced in-silico neoantigen prediction platform powered by machine learning based algorithms that have been refined over more than 20 years by Providence-based EpiVax Inc.