OncoSec Medical Inc. will present clinical results evaluating the company’s ImmunoPulse immunotherapy at Melanoma Bridge 2014. The event will be held in Naples, Italy, at the Royal Continental Hotel.
The company has been developing DNA-based intratumoral cancer immunotherapies that can be used to treat melanoma.
The Melanoma Bridge 2014 meeting aims to bring together worldwide experts in both immunology and biology of cancer microenvironment fields. The event is being organized by the Istituto Nazionale Tumori Fondazione “G. Pascale”, Fondazione Melanoma Onlus and Sidra Medical and Research Center, together with the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC).
Mai H. Le, M.D., OncoSec’s Chief Medical Officer said 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 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,” added the Chief Scientific Officer, Robert H. Pierce, M.D..
The outcomes of the two clinical studies that evaluated the safety and efficacy of intratumoral electroporation of plasmid interleukin-12 in patients with metastatic melanoma will be presented in two abstracts to be discussed separately: “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 (OMS-I100).“
OncoSec Medical Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company developing ImmunoPulse intratumoral cancer immunotherapy. 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.
According to the company’s website, this technique brought positive phase I results for metastatic melanoma: 90 percent of the tumors demonstrated local control, 53 percent of the metastatic disease showed objective response and 16 percent of the patients were in complete tumor regression.
