USPTO grants new patent to Intellect's Alzheimer's vaccine

Mar 9 2011

Intellect Neurosciences, Inc. (OTCBB:ILNS), a biopharmaceutical company with an internal preclinical and clinical-stage pipeline and licenses with major pharmaceutical companies covering products in late-stage clinical trials, announced today that it has received a new patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO") in relation to the Company's RECALL-VAX^TM technology platform.  Patents for RECALL-VAX^TM have been issued in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and corresponding patent applications are pending in Canada, China, Japan and Israel.  RECALL-VAX^TM is a method to immunize people to produce highly specific natural antibodies against the beta amyloid ("Aβ") protein before it causes irreversible damage by accumulating in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. The vaccine has the potential to delay onset or prevent Alzheimer's disease in individuals susceptible by age, genetic or other risk factor. The approach can be applied to additional therapeutic targets associated with Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative conditions.  Professor Benjamin Chain, Department of Immunology, UCL School of Life and Medical Sciences, London, UK, is the inventor of RECALL-VAX^TM. Professor Chain, brother of Dr. Daniel Chain, Intellect's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, is a member of the Company's scientific advisory board. 

Dr. Daniel Chain commented: "This new patent from the USPTO is yet another important milestone for the Company and is indicative of the type of ground breaking research we do that is aimed at discovering and developing drugs that can fundamentally transform the way Alzheimer's disease is treated and ultimately prevent the onset of the disease. Intellect has two immunotherapy approaches: The more advanced of the two is the ANTISENILIN^® platform, which uses recombinant monoclonal antibodies as highly specific drugs to prevent the accumulation of soluble Aβ in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. The ANTISENILIN^® technology underlies products under development by major pharmaceutical companies, such as Ponezumab in Phase 2 and Bapineuzumab in Phase 3 clinical trials, respectively. RECALL-VAX^TM pinpoints the same unique molecular signatures at the ends of Aβ to reproduce the same type of specificity that can be obtained using ANTISENILIN^® monoclonal antibodies. However, instead of administering antibodies to patients, RECALL-VAX^TM involves injecting a small piece of Aβ coupled to an innocuous bacterial protein with the goal of allowing the patient's immune system to generate antibodies that uniquely bind Aβ. A vaccine of this nature, which is analogous to a flu shot, could be viewed as the ultimate quest in Alzheimer's research.  We look forward to developing drug candidates based on RECALL-VAX^TM technology with the aim of ultimately testing the vaccine in human clinical trials."