Mayo Clinic is partnering with a Seattle-based biotech startup to develop vaccines against breast cancer and smallpox, the company said.
TapImmune Inc. (OTCBB:TPIV) said it reached a deal to license Mayo technology that will help the company develop a vaccine that it says can prompt the body’s immune system to mount an aggressive attack on the diseases.
The startup’s technology, called transporters associated with antigen processing (TAP), helps activate markers on the surface of target cells that attract the fury of pathogen-killing white blood cells, otherwise known as T-cells.
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TapImmune compares its technology to turning on a light bulb on a cancer cell, allowing the T-cell to “see” it more clearly. With infectious diseases, that light bulb burns with greater intensity, which provokes a stronger attack from T-cells.
The company is working with Mayo to develop and test a treatment against a breast cancer called HER2/neu.
“I think there are a lot of vaccine candidates that have gone through the mill and probably failed at Phase 2 or Phase 3, predominantly because the immune recognition and immune stimulation hasn’t been as effective as they needed it to be to come up with an end-level product,” TapImmune president and chief financial officer Denis Corin said in a statement. “TAP is elegantly simple and we believe applicable across multiple types of cancers.”
TapImmune also is partnering with Mayo researchers to create a vaccine against smallpox, which eventually could establish a platform technology to battle other bioterrorism threats.
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