Jul 25, 2022
Andrew Hall is the CEO of IMV Inc, which has developed a platform based on a lipid-in-oil technology that encapsulates the therapeutic. When injected subcutaneously, the drug remains in a specific location to reinvigorate the immune system to overcome the tumor surveillance that allows cancer to grow.
Andrew explains, "There is a checkered history in oncology drug development that is known as vaccines in oncology. For the longest period of time, they were so exciting and, unfortunately, so disappointing in the way they performed clinically. We believe with the technology that we've created at IMV, that we can make vaccines in oncology cool again. We are creating an ability to educate the immune system in a prolonged way, in a way that may present a historical retraction of why things failed before, or maybe it wasn't the targets that made them fail. Maybe it was the way in which the targets were delivered in a meaningful way."
"The initial clinical trials are around a lead product, maveropepimut-S. So the target there is Survivin. Survivin is a target that's been well understood in cancer biology for a long time because it is very typical for a lot of cancers. One of the challenges we have as a company is that we have a number of targets that we could go after in cancer, but we just don't have all of the money in the world. So the reason we've chosen the targets we have, and these are ovarian cancer, these are DBCL, so Diffuse Large B-cell lymphoma basically, and then bladder cancer and other solid cancer is, we know that these cancers are highly overexpressing the target of Survivin. And we know that Survivin, and it's kind of akin to its name, is required for the cancer cell to survive."
@IMV_inc #Immunotherapies #Immunotherapeutics #Cancer #Oncology #LipidinOilTechnology #Survivin #Halifax #NovaScotia
