During the 2014 Melanoma Bridge meeting in Italy, OncoSec Medical Inc., a company focusing on the development of DNA-based intratumoral cancer immunotherapies, will present its most recent data resultant from two clinical studies titled “Long-term overall survival from a phase I trial using intratumoral plasmid interleukin-12 with electroporation in patients with melanoma” and “Intratumoral electroporation of plasmid interleukin-12: efficacy and biomarker analyses from a phase 2 study in melanoma”, which assessed the company’s ImmunoPulse immunotherapy in patients with melanoma.
ImmunoPulse therapy is designed to improve the delivery and uptake of DNA IL-12, along with other DNA-based immune-targeting agents.
This technology consists in the delivery of a plasmid DNA construct that produces the IL-12 protein (through electroporation) that upon entry can induce every transfected cell to produce and secrete the IL-12 protein. Il-12 in turn can identify and eliminate tumor cells as part of a natural immune response.
Clinical studies have already proved this technology to have a good safety profile and promising anti-tumor activity in different types of skin cancers.
Furhtermore, ImmunoPulse can initiate a systemic immune response without creating systemic toxicities, many times associated with other forms of therapies.
OncoSec’s Chief Medical Officer, Mai H. Le, M.D., stated in a press release, “We are looking forward to a great Melanoma Bridge meeting in December and are particularly excited to present both our long-term follow-up data from the Phase 1 trial and the final overall response data from the recently completed Phase 2 study in metastatic melanoma.”
The Phase 2 clinical study, which evaluated ImmunoPulse for the treatment of metastatic melanoma, was developed in collaboration with different academic medical centers. Even though this immunotherapy is still being evaluated in the treatment of melanoma, OncoSec is also aiming to identify new immune-targeting agents directed at different cancer types, as well as assessing the efficacy of combined immunotherapies in the treatment of these malignancies.
“The positive findings from these monotherapy trials really set the stage for our next, critical study in melanoma – testing the combination of IL-12 gene transfer with an anti-PD1/PDL1 therapeutic”, Robert H. Pierce, M.D., Chief Scientific Officer, added in the press release.
