The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted and issued Advaxis, Inc. (OTCBB: ADXS), the live, attenuated Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) vaccine company, patent 7,588,930 “Compositions and Methods for Enhancing Immunogenicity of Antigens.” This patent expands the Company’s intellectual property portfolio to cover another family of adjuvant proteins based upon the Lm protein Act-A.
Advaxis’ platform technology utilizes live, attenuated Lm to stimulate the immune system to attack cancer and infectious disease. Part of the technology uses highly immunogenic Lm proteins as adjuvants, which is done by bioengineering the bacterium to secrete the target antigen fused to a fragment of an Lm adjuvant protein in a single molecule.
Currently, Advaxis is in clinical trials with a strain of Lm that secretes Listeriolysin-O (LLO) fused to the tumor-causing antigen HPV-16 E7. Both LLO and Act-A generate strong innate immune responses. LLO enables the Lm bacterium to escape digestion and infect antigen presenting cells; whereby, the cells then “tell” the immune system what to attack. Act-A enables Lm to become motile and infect adjacent cells. Since both of these proteins facilitate infection our bodies have evolved strong immune responses against them. By using these highly immunogenic protein fragments, the vaccines have a much greater therapeutic effect.
The addition of this new family of antigen-adjuvant proteins, based upon Act-A, enables the development of new vaccines with additional properties not previously possible. For example, Advaxis has filed a patent on a new strain of Lm vaccine that delivers two simultaneous and independent antigen-adjuvant proteins at the same time. And, Advaxis recently announced the receipt of a $210,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to support this research.
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