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Randolph Noelle, a co-founder of ImmuRx, works in his lab at Dartmouth Medical School.
Friday, November 28, 2008
ImmuRx keys in on cancer vaccine
By Jim Kozubek, Special to Mass High Tech
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ImmuRx Inc. is seeking $250,000 of angel seed money as a prelude to an $8 million Series A round of investment it will go after in the first quarter of 2009, to begin clinical trials of a new cancer vaccine.
CEO David DeLucia said Lebanon, N.H.-based ImmuRx wants to use a combination of agonists — molecules that bind to receptors to improve their function — in a metastatic melanoma vaccine that stimulates two receptors of the immune system at once to advance a kind of pincer move on cancer cells. It plans to take the vaccine to clinical trial in 2010 under the lead of Patrick Hwu at the MD Anderson Cancer Treatment Center in Texas.
While ImmuRx is working on fighting melanoma, applications could be broad, with potential to target cancer stem cells, bacterial or viral infections, and HIV/AIDS viruses, DeLucia said.
ImmuRx said it has shown its strategy reduces cancer cells and solid tumors in mouse models, strengthens defenses against bacteria and viruses, increases “killer” thymus lymphocyte (T-cell) counts, and improves immunological response in mice with compromised “helper” T-cells, a characteristic of AIDS.
The immune system is composed of an ancient line of “innate” defenses conserved from the distant past, and an “acquired” set of selective defenses that can generate billions of permutations to fight a pathogen. ImmuRx’s vaccine candidate is intended to activate both parts of the system.
ImmuRx has shown that stimulating receptors for both lines of defense, something like a double-lock system requiring two keys to turn it on, creates a much stronger defense.
Thirty pharmaceutical companies including GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Merck and Co. Inc., Pfizer Inc. and Coley Pharmaceutical Group Inc. have introduced agonists to stimulate either one of these lines of defense with limited effectiveness, since the immune system receptors were discovered in the mid-1990s.
Craig Slingluff, a surgical oncologist at University of Virginia School of Medicine, said “stimulation of the adaptive cellular and innate immune systems is a common approach and is sensible” with agonists used to stimulate innate immunity and the actual vaccine antigen used to stimulate adaptive immunity.
But Slingluff said he knew of no other company that was using such a two-pronged approach to stimulating both receptors with agonists at once, and he said he will "be very interested in seeing the results of their studies."
DeLucia, a former CEO of MIST Inc. is one of the company’s founders, in a group that includes Randolph Noelle, chair of the immunology department at Dartmouth Medical School; Cory Ahonen, a member of Noelle’s lab and a former scientist at 3M Co.; and Ross Kedl, an immunologist at University of Colorado also formerly with 3M.
ImmuRx last year received a $128,000 grant from the New Hampshire Innovation and Research Center. 3M this year took a small equity stake in the company in return for intellectual property rights, and ImmuRx started a partnership with the 25-employee Alligator Bioscience AB of Sweden.
Jim Kozubek is a freelance writer in Portsmouth, N.H.
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