US company signs option with DCU on cancer treatment

A US company looking for a research base found one in Dublin, but in the process also found something unexpected – a technology that could revolutionise its business.

US company Vaccinogen has signed an agreement with Dublin City University giving the firm a two-year option on acquiring a biotechnology analysis platform called DiCast, under undisclosed terms.

The company is setting up a research lab on DCU’s campus and DiCast lead researcher Paul Leonard is moving across to head up the facility.

The plan is to integrate DiCast (Direct Clone Analysis and Selection Technology) into Vaccinogen's current business of developing personalised vaccines that attack any cancer cells left over after surgery to reduce any chance of a cancer recurrence.

Vaccinogen Inc is a biotech company based in Baltimore and formed eight years ago to develop anti-cancer vaccines. The company decided to set up a presence in Europe and opened a lab near Amsterdam, according to company co-founder and chief executive Andy Tussing. “We were looking to build up our research and development effort and knew there was a vast amount of great talent in Ireland. We established an Irish subsidiary and started recruiting.”

Vaccinogen's trawl for researchers and technologies turned up the highly multidisciplinery work being led at Dublin City University by PI and academic Paul Leonard. Tussing and his group in DCU's Biomedical Diagnostics Institute and engineers had developed an unusual biological assay system that makes it fast and easy to trap individual cells and then study their biochemistry in detail.

Just a single millilitre of a biological sample might contain billions of individual cells, so it is a considerable challenge to study cells one by one to assess what they do, Tussing says.

DiCast solves that problem by using bundles of very fine tubes that are so small that only one cell at a time can enter the tube. Millions of these fine tubes can be assembled, with each one taking up a single cell.

If the top and bottom are then sealed, the tubes become an ideal individual incubation chamber to allow the cell to grow. The sensors behind this can process what is going on and what is being produced in parallel, he says. “They analyse in parallel. We don’t just analyse once, we can use multiple tests to build a comprehensive picture of the cell.”

According to Tussing, “we discovered Paul and his team and what he was doing. We got very excited about that, we weren’t looking for DiCast, we were looking for people. But it [DiCast] matches perfectly with what we are trying to achieve.”

The company is trying to find useful antibodies – part of the immune system's attack on invaders such as bacteria or viruses. "What we focus on is harvesting a lot of unique antibodies to develop anti-cancer vaccines," Tussing says.

The company takes a person’s tumour after surgery and processes it to find antibodies that will attack the cancer cells. However, the antibodies they harvest may have a use beyond their role against cancer.

“These antibodies as we uncover them have special characteristics that allow us to do other things,” Tussing adds. “They could be used for treatments, diagnosis and put together to prevent diseases.” This is where the DiCast platform comes in, screening large numbers of antibodies to assess their value.

Company chief operations officer Peter Morsing assessed the technology, describing it as “the perfect fit for us”. The company did not move to buy immediately, however, to allow additional development. “Because it was not 100 per cent validated,” Morsing says, “we made a deal with the university to have an option to acquire.”

There is great confidence that it will work, though. Leonard moved across to the research lab along with three members of his team, and the lab will probably have between seven and 10 researchers. Early funding for DiCast came from Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation via the DCU institute.

The immune system usually mops up abnormal cells, killing them off before they can do any damage. For some reason, though, the immune cells start ignoring mutant cells, allowing a tumour to grow and invade.

There is a lot of interest in the idea of using the body’s own immune system to attack cancers rather than relying on radiation or chemotherapy. Results have been mixed, though, and it is difficult to produce vaccines that attack the cancer while leaving healthy tissue alone.

Vaccinogen decided to use a vaccine development approach taken by company co-founder Michael Hanna, a former director of the US National Cancer Institute at the Frederick Cancer Research Center in Maryland.

The company has already enjoyed good early human trial results for its OncoVax vaccine that significantly reduces colon cancer recurrence from one in three to one in 10 in trials.