Oncimmune Holdings plc (LON:ONC), a leading early cancer detection company developing and commercialising its proprietary EarlyCDT® platform technology, and Scancell Holdings plc, (‘Scancell’) the developer of novel immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, announced today the presentation of data on the use of Oncimmune’s autoantibody technology to successfully predict disease recurrence in subjects undergoing SCIB1 immunotherapy for malignant melanoma. The data will be presented at the Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) Immuno-Oncology Summit 2017 on August 29th 2017.
The collaborative study, which also included a team at the University of Nottingham, developed a method using a panel of seven tumour associated autoantibodies to predict disease recurrence in patients with resected Stage III/IV melanoma treated with Scancell’s SCIB1 immunotherapy. Whilst Phase I/II trials with SCIB1 have been highly encouraging, this additional information potentially enables the identification of patients prior to commencement of therapy who are most likely to respond to treatment in future clinical trials with SCIB1.
Geoffrey Hamilton-Fairley, Oncimmune Holdings plc Chief Executive Officer, commented: “This is the first of a number of companion diagnostics programmes we are undertaking, having shown with internal data that by using Oncimmune’s autoantibody platform it is possible to differentiate patient responses to a range of cancer treatments. While validation on a larger data set is necessary, these results indicate that in this case it was possible to identify patients who are most likely to respond to Scancell’s SC1B1 and thus further demonstrate the potential of our technology in this application.”
Dr Richard Goodfellow, CEO of Scancell added: “If this preliminary data is confirmed in a larger clinical study, it has the potential to improve the design of future clinical trials using SCIB1 by selecting patients most likely to positively respond to our novel treatment and thereby increase the chances of a successful outcome.”
