OncoSec Medical Inc (ONCSQ)

[guti]

On January 22, the poster presentation Phase 1/2a study of double immune suppression blockade by combining a CSF1R inhibitor (pexidartinib/PLX3397) with an anti PD-1 antibody (pembrolizumab) to treat advanced melanoma and other solid tumors will be presented as poster. In the study sponsored by Plexxicon, Dr. S. Hu-Lieskovan and Dr. Antoni Ribas are both UCLA investigators in the clinical trial and Merck is providing the funding.

On October, 2015, Daiichi Sankyo and Plexxicon’s investigational CSF-1R Inhibitor Pexidartinib picked up the FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation for a Phase III cancer drug, putting it in line for preferential access to agency experts as it moves toward approval.

In March 2015, Drs. Ribas and Hu-Lieskovan found that a new triple combination therapy shows promising signs of more effectively controlling advanced melanoma than previous treatments and also with fewer side effects. In the new study led, by UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, the scientists combined targeted therapies utilizing the BRAF inhibitor drug dabrafenib and the MEK inhibitor drug trametinib, with immunotherapy, which is treatment that uses a person’s own immune system to help fight cancer. Both drugs belong to GlaxoSmithKline.

Before that, on November 2014, Drs. Paul Tumeh and Antoni Ribas, colleagues at UCLA published results from an assay in demonstrating a strong correlation between the density of CD8+ T cells, located at the invasive edge of melanoma lesions, and the probability of response to Merck’s pembrolizumab. Using quantitative image analysis, Tumeh demonstrated that the number of CD8+ T cells/mm2 at the tumor margin was the feature most predictive of response and non-response to pembrolizumab. At the same time, both doctors began working in a preclinical collaboration between Plexxikon, UCLA and Oncosec, to test the combination of Plexxikon’s selective CSF-1R inhibitor pexidartinib(PLX3397) with OncoSec’s Immunopulse IL-12.