THE WOODLANDS, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Opexa Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:OPXA), a company involved in the development and commercialization of cell therapies, announced encouraging data from a clinical trial of 15 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Published in Arthritis & Rheumatism (Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 453-463), the trial was conducted at the Shanghai Institutes of Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences of the People’s Republic of China (SIBS), using T-cell vaccination technology exclusively licensed to Opexa. The results demonstrated that T-cell vaccination was well tolerated and, importantly, induced T-cell regulatory immune responses which collectively correlated with substantial clinical improvement in treated patients. Using the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria to measure reduction in joint swelling, substantial clinical improvements were observed for ACR 20 (73.3%), ACR 50 (67.7%) and ACR 70 (55.3%). Overall there was a significant reduction (p < 0.01) in swollen and tender joint counts. The observed changes in the clinical parameters correlated with a significant (p < 0.05) reduction from baseline in serum markers of inflammation, including erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), C-reactive protein (CRP) and rheumatoid factor (RF). The open label trial included 15 patients who received T-cell vaccination via six subcutaneous inoculations over a period of 12 months.
