This morning the 2A Pharma board of directors met to receive a progress update and discuss strategic choices.
I was very happy to be able to report to the board members that we are now one month into the AAVLP-EpCAM anti-cancer vaccine project and we are on time and on budget. During these first months of the project, we are not expecting anything dramatic as the focus is on producing a new batch of the vaccine. However, it is very satisfying that the technical specialists are in place and working in the laboratory.
We are also working with BioTest Facility in Aarhus, Denmark, to prepare for the animal studies in Aim 2, due to start at the beginning of December. This work involves agreeing on and preparing written protocols that define the studies in detail, submitting applications to the Animal Experiments Inspectorate of the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries for ethical permission to undertake the studies, and ordering the required animals and consumables.
In Aim 5, we are screening the antibodies elicited by our vaccine against a panel of cancer types to investigate where we get the best response. This was initially intended to be an in vitro study, i.e., a laboratory bench, assay-based study, but we are now working with an innovative Swedish company to explore the possibility to test our vaccines in their in vivo models. In a coming update, we will provide more information about this potentially very exciting development that may be able to give us even stronger data.
IN THE NEWS
We were excited to see that Dr Katalin Karikó and Dr Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work with messenger RNA. We are probably all aware of the success story regarding extremely rapid development of COVID vaccines using their technology, but it is perhaps less known that for many years the scientific community largely ignored Karikó and Weissman who found it extremely difficult to find funding for their work and to get their articles published. It certainly shows that persistence can pay off. While 2A Pharma does not work with mRNA, the objectives of mRNA and AAVLP based vaccines are the same: to elicit a reaction from the immune system to generate antibodies against a desired target. For those of you who watch the Swedish news on SVT, you may have seen the interview with Professor Gunilla Karlsson-Hedestam, the Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, where anti-cancer vaccines were highlighted as a very exciting emerging area. The 2A Pharma team wholeheartedly agree with Professor Karlsson-Hedestam.(SVT2, Monday, 2 October 2023, 21:00)
That is it for this month’s information. We shall return in about a month’s time with another update.
