Many have tried, and failed, attempting to develop personalized immune therapies for cancer. Northwest Biotheraputics (NWBO.OB, www.nwbio.com), however, is an industry leading company at the forefront, now making such immunotherapies a reality. The company has developed DCVax - a personalized, economical cancer vaccine with unprecedented survival efficacy and no toxicity such as that associated with chemotherapies.
The implications, science, and data are profound and, as such, might you consider connecting with a Florida-based patient and/or a NWBT executive to explore this compelling next-gen biopharma topic further?
NWBT’s ground-breaking personalized cancer vaccine, DCVax, is now in a large, randomized, double blind, placebo controlled Phase II clinical trial. Fully 80% of the patients in NWBT’s clinical trials have shown a significant clinical response to the treatment, compared to just 25-30% of patients for chemotherapy. What’s more, DCVax has added years of survival for patients in these trials, compared to 10 weeks of added survival with typical chemotherapies, and this personalized vaccine is non-toxic with no serious side effects. DCVax also offers the potential for far more cost effective treatment compared with chemotherapies and targeted cancer drugs, for both the patient and the healthcare system at large.
“DCVax is a cancer therapy game-changer, and a great improvement over chemotherapies both for extended survival and for quality of life,” said Linda Powers, chair of NWBT’s Board. “DCVax will also be one of the first products to show that personalized medicines can be as economical - or more so - than mass produced off the shelf drugs for the healthcare system.”
Healthcare and biotech analyst Dr. Navid Malik underscores the significance of DCVax, having noted, “NWBT has a strong vaccine technology platform, which delivers, for the very first time, on the promise of personalized medicine in the vaccine field.”
Simply stated, DCVax is custom-made in a special clean room laboratory by exposing a patient’s Dendritic cells - the immune system’s master cells – to biomarkers from that same patient’s tumor cells extracted during surgery. During this 10-day activation and “education” process, the Dendritic cells digest the tumor cells and, in doing so, become primed to teach the body’s other immune cells to aggressively and naturally seek out and kill cancer cells which display the same biomarkers associated with the patient’s own tumor. The activated and “educated” Dendritic cells are then shipped back to the patient’s physician, where they are injected into the patient like a simple flu shot under the skin. Once injected, the “smart” Dendritic cells educate the body’s other immune cells to similarly seek out and attack the cancer.
The result? DCVax has shown striking and consistent effectiveness in clinical trials over the last 5 years by greatly delaying the time to disease progression or recurrence, and substantially extending the survival time for patients. For example, in the case of Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM - the most aggressive form of brain cancer), the median time from initial diagnosis to death with full standard of care treatment - surgery, radiation and chemotherapy - is only about 14.6 months. With NWBT’s DCVax-Brain vaccine added, that survival time is extended to a median time of about 36.4 months in clinical trials thus far.
Fully 85% of the patients treated with DCVax-Brain in the company’s clinical trials have lived longer than the 14.6 months median survival time. Furthermore, more than 20% of the patients treated with DCVax-Brain have reached or exceeded the 6-year survival mark. Under the standard of care treatment, less than 5% of GBM patients are still alive after 5 years, and virtually no one is still alive at 6 years. And, unlike chemotherapy, DCVax vaccines are non-toxic and are well tolerated.
In addition to showing such extended survival times, clinical trial patients treated with DCVax-Brain also have shown striking delays in disease progression (recurrence) of their cancer. Typically, in spite of surgical removal of the initial tumor, as well as radiation and chemotherapy, GBM brain tumors under the standard of care recur in just 6.9 months. In contrast, in the patients treated with DCVax®-Brain in NWBT’s clinical trials so far, 74% of the patients have been free of recurrence for at least 1 year, 45% recurrence-free for 2 years, 33% recurrence-free for 3 years, 28% free for 4 years and 22% free for 5 years.
Particularly for the majority of patients for whom conventional chemotherapy treatments have proven ineffective, personalized immune cell therapies such as NWBT’s DCVax hold real hope and increasingly demonstrated promise. There is tremendous unmet need for this type of cancer immunotherapy on a worldwide basis, with Datamonitor forecasting that the emerging cancer vaccine industry will realize revenues of US$3.12 billion by 2015. Northwest Biotherapeutics is one company leading the charge with its cutting edge Dendritic cell technology-based personalized immunotherapy, offering superior clinical efficacy and business model.
Please let me know if you would like more information on Northwest Biothereputics, if you would like to connect with a company executive for an interview, if you need high resolution story artwork, or if you need anything else as you consider coverage on this extraordinary topic.
Merilee Kern Market Media Connect 858-577-0206 merilee@marketmediaconnect.com
