• Home
• English
• DNAVEC’s Business Profile
• Gene vaccines
• Antitumor Vaccine Against Multiple Types of Cancer (DC Therapy)

DC therapy, which makes use of patient’s own Dendritic Cells (DC), is viewed as one of the most promising immune therapy against cancer. Dendritic cells are a kind of blood cells, which, when activated, circulate the whole body in blood stream, and engulf and remove tumor cells and other abnormal materials. Based on this phenomenon, DC therapy has been developed to treat cancer, in which Dendritic Cells or Dendritic Precursor Cells collected from patient’s bone marrow or blood stream are stimulated with disrupted tumor cells or tumor antigens, and then returned to patient’s body. However, DC therapy have so far suffered from a number of drawbacks; the DC activation requires use of multiple, costly cytokines (hormone-like proteins) and takes a long period of time. Also the activation is often insufficient for therapy, resulting in unsatisfactory efficacy rates of only a few %. In collaboration with Kyushu University Faculty of Medicine and the DNAVEC-sponsored chair at Graduate School of Medicine of Chiba University, DNAVEC has recently made two important technological advances described below, which may mark an epoch in DC therapy:

• Novel method of DC activation

  We discovered that Sendai virus vector by itself or Sendai virus vector carrying the gene for a cytokine called interferon β activates DC with great efficiency, and requires a minimal amount of costly cytokines. In addition, we have established an activation method that does not require patient’s tumor tissue. We confirmed the effectiveness of the method in a study using mouse melanoma model of cancer, in which a very high efficacy rate was achieved. Preclinical studies have shown that our DC therapy is also effective against cancers of the lung, prostate and esophagus as well as neuroblastoma. Kyushu University has already initiated the internal review of the clinical study protocol of DNAVEC’s DC therapy targeting neuroblastoma, thus heightening the expectation that it may become the cancer therapy of tomorrow.

• Novel method of DC amplification

  The amount of DC recoverable from a patient is limited and often insufficient for even a single administration, let alone for multiple administrations. We have developed a new DC amplification method that may solve this problem once and for all.

1. Target disorders:

   Melanoma, Neuroblastoma, Lung cancer, Prostate cancer, Esophagus cancer

   
2. How it works:

   The Sendai virus vector shows, along with the highly efficient gene transfer capability, a superior effect in the activation and functional enhancement of DC, which have the strong tumor antigen presentation capability. Such functional enhancement of DC leads to sufficient functional maintenance of Cytotoxic T Cells (CTL), thus achieving potent anti-tumor effects as the tumor vaccine.