Advaxis doses 1st patients with personalized cancer immunotherapy

Advaxis announced it has commenced a Phase 1 trial with the dosing of the first patient with ADXS-NEO, an investigational personalized immunotherapy approach targeting personal neoantigens found by sequencing a patient’s own cancer cells. ADXS-NEO is being evaluated in an open-label, dose-escalation, multicenter Phase 1 clinical trial in the United States. The study is open to patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer, or NSCLC, metastatic microsatellite stable colon cancer and metastatic squamous head and neck cancer. The first patient dosed is being treated for non-small cell lung cancer. ADXS-NEO is being developed in collaboration with Amgen. Advaxis is leading clinical development through proof-of-concept. Pre-clinical findings for ADXS-NEO were presented at the 2018 American Association for Cancer Research, or AACR. The company presented data in mouse models showing that ADXS-NEO generates T cell responses against neoantigen peptides that control tumor growth, even when they were identified as “non-immunogenic” using a conventional peptide-adjuvant immunization. Additionally, data were presented highlighting the capacity of the Advaxis Lm vector and its ability to target frameshift mutations of greater than 90 amino acids, and to generate T cells to multiple neoantigens per frameshift in tumor mouse models. Enrolled patients will undergo a biopsy, and Advaxis will then manufacture an investigational personalized treatment for each patient based on an analysis of their tumor neoantigen mutations, which will be ready to dose within 8 weeks of the initial biopsy.

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