Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Collaborators Publish New Pre-clinical Results on Ex Vivo Applications of RNAi to Enhance Dendritic Cell Vaccines for Cancer

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: ALNY), a leading RNAi therapeutics company, and collaborators at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands announced today that they have published new pre-clinical results in the journal Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy (doi:10.1007/s00262-012-1334-1) describing the development of a dendritic cell (DC) cancer vaccine with enhanced immunogenic potential. The findings show that ex vivo RNAi targeting of the programmed death ligands (PD-L1 and PD-L2) can significantly boost the immunogenicity of DC-based vaccines. These results could lead to the development of improved cellular vaccine therapies for the treatment of cancer and chronic viral infections.