Scancell Holdings - SCANCELL TO TARGET RIVAL'S VACCINE - SCANCELL REVEALS PLAN TO TARGET...

SCANCELL REVEALS PLAN TO TARGET RIVAL'S LEAD VACCINE

Its no secret that Scancell has rival manufacturer Dendreon firmly in its sights. Dendreon holds the coveted position as leader of the therapeutic cancer vaccine market but not for long if Scancell has its way.

Dendreon has been a true trail blazer and its founders were the brains behind the only type of therapeutic cancer vaccine to get commercial approval by the FDA, the dendritic cell vaccine. Non-toxic and cleverly marshalling the patient's own immune system to fight off the disease, they thought they had it made when their first vaccine to treat prostate cancer entered the market place. Their science which used the immune system's sentinels, the dendritic cells, to alert the immune system to the presence of cancer was truly ground breaking but the technology they devised to produce their vaccine was simply uneconomic. Patients had to have their blood collected and sent off to Dendreon so their dendritic cells could be extracted, primed with cancer proteins to allow the immune system to identify and hunt down the cancer and returned for re-infusing back into the patient again. So every batch had to be 'tailor made' for just one patient! It cost the proverbial arm and a leg. $93,000 for a course of treatment that never really worked at its best because of the damage the patient's dendritic cells suffered in the process.

But the real nightmare for Dendreon began when Scancell came up with an alternative dendritic cell vaccine that didn't need patients' blood to make it. In fact Scancell's vaccine actually coated a patient's dendritic cells with cancer proteins while they were still in the patient's body; outdoing Dendreon's expensive 'one patient at a time' vaccine with one that could be mass produced to treat millions of patients from a single batch!

Scancell has achieved this by designing a DNA cancer vaccine called ImmunoBody that instructs the patient's own cells to produce special antibodies which mimic cancer proteins and stick to the surfaces of the patient's dendritic cells. The alarm is raised and the immune system seeks out and destroys the cancer these special antibodies are mimicking. Scancell's vaccine is also re-programmable, enabling it to target any kind of cancer by simply altering its DNA program to cause the production of antibodies that mimic the proteins of a different type of cancer.

THE CONFERENCE THAT TIME FORGOT
As far as most commentators knew Scancell was working on just two ImmunoBody vaccines, SCIB1 to treat melanoma, which is currently in Phase 2 clinical trials and SCIB2 to treat lung cancer which is now ready for trialling. So until last weekend, Dendreon could have comforted itself with the notion that Scancell was swimming in its neighbours' pools. But owing to the diligent research and dogged inquiry of a poster on London South East Scancell Share Chat, Inanaco, Scancell has revealed that they are working on a new ImmunoBody vaccine to treat prostate cancer as well! This has to be Dendreon's worst nightmare.

This astonishing news was initially 'leaked,' but went largely unreported, in a 15 minute presentation at the 12th International Conference on Progress in Vaccination Against Cancer (PIVAC) on Wednesday 12th September 2012. The paper entitled, "Development of new prostate cancer vaccine strategies using PAP as target antigen," described a collaborative project between Scancell and researchers at Nottingham Trent University.

The paper doesn't mince its words. It makes it abundantly clear that the intention is to use Scancell's ImmunoBody DNA vaccine technology to make a mass market successor to Dendreon's only commercial product, its prostate cancer vaccine Provenge. SCIB3, as it will no doubt be called, will encode epitopes from the same antigen used in Provenge. But even more alarmingly for any of Scancell's competitors in the prostate cancer field, Scancell seems to be preparing a prophylactic prostate cancer vaccine as well, intended to prevent the disease developing in the first place. And if you don't think that Scancell are serious about this just take a look at what Professor Lindy Durrant said about Scancell's SCIB 1 vaccine as long ago as May 2010:

"In the short term, this could cure some patients with the disease, and in the long term it could be used to prevent people developing it in the first place."

A WEEKEND OF REVELATIONS
Having come across the above research in PIVAC's conference program, Inanaco sent an email to Scancell seeking clarification of their apparent intentions to develop a vaccine to treat prostate cancer. These intentions were then confirmed in an email from the company which was then posted by Inanaco on London South East's Scancell Chat last Sunday afternoon at 16:10. It read:

Hi *****

You certainly are diligent in your research!! This is early stage research on a possible new ImmunoBody for prostate cancer. We also have several others in development but do not normally make any announcements until we have developed the vaccine to the point where it is sufficiently advanced to be considered a candidate already ready for clinical development (such as SCIB2)

Kind regards

Richard

So Dendreon, you have been warned, but there is precious little you can do about it anyway. Scancell is technologically so far in advance of any other company producing dendritic cell vaccines that its competition might be best advised to prepare for the inevitable. What's that I hear, "Scancell's just a tiny British company with a few million dollars in the bank?" Think again, at the end of this year Scancell is going to be offered up for sale to the highest bidder. The directors have already told the press that they have been approached by suitors so its only a matter of time until the big boys get hold of Scancell's breakthrough DNA technology. Then it really will be curtains for Dendreon.

Research link:
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