Immunocellular Therapeutics' pilot study can help in early cancer detection

Sep 30 2009

ImmunoCellular Therapeutics, Ltd. (OTCBB: IMUC), a clinical-stage biotechnology company that is developing immune-based therapies for the treatment of brain and other cancers, announced today results from its pilot study evaluating the cancer detection abilities of one of its lead monoclonal antibody product candidates, ICT-109. Data from this study demonstrated that ICT-109 had a statistically significant ability to discriminate between cancerous and non-cancerous samples, suggesting the potential to detect pancreatic and lung cancer in plasma and serum study sets.

The study used reverse phase micro array technology to determine serum and plasma expression levels of glycosylated CEA, and was performed in collaboration with Dr. Emanuel Petricoin at George Mason University. Dr. Petricoin is a renowned microbiologist who was a senior investigator with the US FDA’s Office of Cell Tissue and Gene Therapies in the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research earlier in his career. He and his colleague, Lance Liotta, invented the Reverse Phase Protein Microarray technology.

Researchers at George Mason University investigated the ability of ICT-109 to detect pancreatic and lung cancer by binding specifically to glycosylated epitopes of CEA-CAM6 and CEA-CAM5, two common markers that are overly expressed in a majority of cancers. Glycosylated CEA is highly expressed in patients with pancreatic and lung cancers, and can be used to detect these cancers using a direct blood test.

“The results from this study encourage us to believe that ICT-109 could become an important component of future diagnostic technologies for the reliable and early detection of cancers for which early detection is critical for effective treatment,” commented Manish Singh, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of IMUC. “This ability to in many cases detect the markers associated with cancer could be combined with therapeutic applications for ICT-109 to deliver a treatment for small cell lung cancer and pancreatic cancers in the not too distant future. With this promising data, we look forward to conducting additional studies of ICT-109 in combination with other markers to design a sufficiently robust assay for early stage detection of these cancers that could potentially be widely adopted as a diagnostic tool in this field. The next step is to find a partner within the diagnostic space to further develop and commercialize this approach.”

Petricoin added, “Identification of protein biomarkers that can discriminate early stage lung and pancreatic cancer from benign lesions and inflammatory conditions could aid in the detection of these cancers when treatment could provide the best results.” He went on to say, “I’m particularly excited and intrigued that the specific protein biomarkers that ICT-109 binds to are abnormally glycosylated. If one had looked at the total levels of the protein alone, they would not have been able to discriminate the diseases. Only when we utilized ImmunoCellular’s specific antibody that only binds to the proteins when they are abnormally glycosylated did we get these exciting results. This demonstrates a unique aspect of proteomics that genomics cannot provide.”