MDX-1307 is the mAb Medarex hopes to be able to build up a new company around. Partly externally financed if one is to believe the company's latest 10K. Ambitious, no doubt.
We are in the process of a possible public offering of a portion of the common stock of our wholly-owned subsidiary Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. As part of this transaction, we intend to assign our rights to this product, including the associated IND, to Celldex. In such event, we will not be entitled to license fees or milestone payments with respect to this product. We may be entitled to receive royalty payments on any product sales.
For background information there is not much released yet that I have been able to find. But there was a presentation at IDM's Journées des Cordeliers last autumn. The corresponding "abstract" looks as follows and should give some idea about what they are hoping to achieve. [Text scanned and OCRd so there may be some spelling mistakes by the OCR-software).
Erik
Michael Fanger, Michael j. Endres, Li-Zhen He, Venky Ramakrishna, John E.
Connolly, Joel Goldstein, John F. Treml, Paul K. Wallace, and Tibor Keler
To be effective, a vaccine must first be delivered to an efficient antigen-presenting cell (APC), and to intracellular compartments that permit its proper processing and presentation.
Here we describe the use of monoclonal antibodies specific for receptors on APCs to target tumor antigens directly to dendritic cells (DCs). In particular, we use fusion proteins consisting of tumor-associated antigen linked to humanized anti-CD64 or to fully human anti-mannose receptor (MR) antibodies. These fusion proteins are rapidly internalized by DCs through a unique intracellular pathway that initially co-localizes with MHC class I-rich vesicles, followed by long term intracellular retention.
We have shown that antigens targeted in this manner to either CD64 or MR are efficiently processed and presented in the context of MHC class I. Furthermore, targeting the oncofetal antigen, human chorionic gonadotropin 13 subunit (hCG13) and the melanoma antigen pmel-17 to MR resulted in the induction of hCG13 or pmel-l7-specific effector T cells that recognize HLA-matched antigen-bearing tumor cells.
Due to their restricted expression, efficiency of antigen capture, intracellular association with MHC Class I containing vesicles, and ability to generate potent anti-tumor responses, targeting tumor-associated antigens to MR or CD64 may be useful in inducing and/or enhancing anti-tumor immunity in patients.
HCG-VAC, a fusion of the anti-MR antibody to hCG13, will go into clinical trials early in 2004 for hCG13-expressing malignancies including many renal, colorectal, bladder, and pancreatic cancers.
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