CEL-SCI Corporation (NYSE AMEX: CVM) announced today that its Taiwanese partner, Orient Europharma, has concluded the Site Initiation Visit for the first Taiwanese clinical center in CEL-SCI's Phase III clinical trial for Multikine®, the Company's flagship cancer immunotherapy. The first center is called Shin Kong Wu Ho-Su Memorial Hospital and is located in Taipei, Taiwan. The Site Initiation Visit is the final step before patient enrollment begins. The Multikine to be used in the study is being delivered this week to Taiwan, and patient enrollment is expected to start soon.
Orient Europharma plans to sign up another 6 Taiwanese clinical centers to conduct this study, which is already ongoing at multiple clinical sites in the United States, Canada, Poland, Hungary and India. The total study is expected to enroll about 880 head and neck cancer patients in over 40 hospitals in 9 countries. CEL-SCI's partner Teva Pharmaceuticals will conduct parts of the Phase III study in Israel.
Geert Kersten, CEO of CEL-SCI said, "Taiwan has a large number of head and neck cancer cases due to the widespread use of betel nut, along with alcohol and smoking, which are common causes of head and neck cancer. We expect Taiwan to rapidly accelerate our overall patient enrollment as head and neck cancer represents a large unmet medical need in the country."
The goal of this study is to establish Multikine as a first-line standard of care therapy in treating newly diagnosed head and neck cancer patients. The trial is believed to be the largest head and neck cancer study ever conducted and is called "IT-MATTERS", an acronym for: Immunotherapy Multikine Anti Tumor Treatments.
CEL-SCI's Phase III clinical trial is an open-label, randomized, controlled, multi-center study designed to determine if Multikine administered prior to current standard of care (Surgery plus Radiotherapy or Surgery plus Concurrent Radiochemotherapy) used for treatment of naive subjects with Advanced Primary Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Oral Cavity/Soft Palate (Head and Neck cancer) will result in an increased overall rate of survival versus the subjects treated with standard of care only. It will also be the first trial in which immunotherapy will be administered before any other traditional means of care are attempted.
Phase II clinical trials of Multikine demonstrated the product was safe and well-tolerated and eliminated tumors in 12% of the subjects less than a month into treatment. The Multikine treatment regimen was also shown to kill, on average, about half of the cancer cells in the subjects' tumors before the start of standard therapy. Follow-up studies of subjects enrolled in the "proof of concept" Phase II trial showed a 33% improvement in the survival rate of those treated with Multikine at a median of three and a half years following surgery. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted orphan drug status to Multikine in the neoadjuvant therapy of patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.
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