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ApoVax104 Competitive Advantage
The ApoVax104 vaccine platform has a unique mechanism of action not shared by any other vaccines on the market or in clinical trials which may make it the first therapeutic cancer vaccine to translate effectively into the clinic.
Firstly, the ApoVax104 immunotherapy consists of the immunoregulatory ApoVax104 protein combined with a disease-specific antigen. When administered into the body, ApoVax104 enhances uptake of the antigen into specialized immune cells whose main function is to process antigen material and present it to other cells of the immune system, thereby activating an immune response. These specialized cells are called dendritic cells.
Delivery of the antigen to the dendritic cells by ApoVax104 results in a cascade of immune responses that leads to the activation of the body's cellular and humoral immune system to attack and kill cells involved in tumor growth and infectious disease proliferation. As a result, ApoVax104 activates both the innate (non-specific) and adaptive (specific) arms of the immune system.
However, what sets ApoVax104 apart from other vaccines is that it not only activates both arms of the immune system, it overcomes immune evasion strategies used by tumors and chronic infections to survive in the body. ApoVax104 overcomes these evasion strategies by inhibiting a specific set of immune cells called T regulatory cells.
In tumors, T regulatory cells are employed to shut down normal immune defenses in the tumor microenvironment thereby creating an immunosuppressive environment and evading the immune system. Because of their dominant role in tumor immune evasion mechanisms, T regulatory cells are an ideal target for therapeutic purposes. In fact, the challenge for therapeutic vaccines for HPV-associated disease has been reversing the immunologically suppressive microenvironment caused by T regulatory cells which dominate the cervical lesions and abolish the killer T cell defense response. By doing so the cytotoxic killer T cells are denied access to the infected and neoplastic cells.
A cancer vaccine that disrupts T regulatory suppression in combination with immune activation, like ApoVax104, presents an important therapeutic approach with a greater likelihood of success in the clinic. Preclinical studies and clinical trials testing T regulatory cell depletion or abrogation of their suppressive function improve anti-tumor immunity and show promise for novel therapeutic vaccines.
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