Dramatic Patient Survival Benefit Shown for New Approach to Treating Glioblastoma Multiforme Licensed to Annias Immunotherapeutics

CHAPEL HILL, N.C., March 12, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Annias Immunotherapeutics today announced the online publication in Nature of new clinical results demonstrating a dramatic improvement in survival for patients with lethal Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) brain tumors who were treated with an innovative new cancer vaccine and approach to therapy developed by the company's scientific founder and collaborators at Duke Cancer Institute. The experimental treatment used a tetanus vaccine booster to prime the immune system prior to administration of a therapeutic vaccine targeting a strain of Cytomegalovirus (CMV) that is harbored in many solid tumor types but is not present in healthy surrounding tissues.  While patients with glioblastoma rarely survive more than 18 months from diagnosis, most of the 24 patients who received the new immunotherapy in two Phase 1/2 studies lived nearly five years or longer, with the longest survivor still disease-free eight years from diagnosis.

"We congratulate Dr. Sampson and his collaborators at Duke Cancer Institute and the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke on their outstanding and very exciting work," said Reiner Laus, M.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Annias Immunotherapeutics, Inc. "This approach to treatment has the potential not only to improve therapy for patients with a highly lethal brain cancer, but also other solid tumor cancers including breast, colorectal and prostate cancers. Moreover, the discovery that preconditioning the immune system through vaccination to an unrelated antigen like tetanus can greatly increase the efficacy of a subsequently administered therapeutic vaccine offers the potential to dramatically improve all vaccination approaches."

"This work furthermore clearly demonstrates that CMV, which is present in many cancers, can be targeted selectively to treat solid tumors like GBM," he added. "The immune system is very well suited to attacking viruses, and cancer vaccines that target viruses have a proven track record of success, as demonstrated by the anti-HPV vaccine, Gardasil."

Dr. Laus noted that Annias Immunotherapeutics has gained exclusive license to the intellectual property portfolio relating to both targeting CMV in cancer and to the pre-conditioning approach developed at Duke. The company plans to conduct human clinical trials in 2015 with PEP-CMV, a second-generation version of the technology licensed from Duke, which offers the prospects for an "off-the-shelf" peptide based cancer vaccine. The clinical development of autologous dendritic cell therapy using the tetanus vaccine booster will continue in parallel.

About Annias Immunotherapeutics, Inc.
Annias Immunotherapeutics, Inc. is a clinical stage immuno-oncology company focused on the development of novel immunotherapeutic approaches to the treatment of cancers that containing Cytomegalovirus (CMV).  The company's approach is based on a patented and proprietary immunotherapeutic platform, discovered at Duke University, which harnesses the body's immune system to recognize, attack and destroy tumor cells containing CMV. CMV is over-expressed in a variety of human cancers including significant and homogeneous expression in almost all glioblastoma, but not in normal brain tissue. Annias Immunotherapeutics focuses on this opportunity to use CMV proteins as tumor-specific targets. For more information, please contact Reiner Laus, M.D. President and CEO of Annias Immunotherapeutics at [email protected]  or visit our website at http://www.anniasimmuno.com.

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SOURCE Annias Immunotherapeutics, Inc.

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