I think you have it right senti, neoantigens are not found on normal tissue and are tumor-specific. They can be highly immunogenic as they are recognized by the immune system as non-self, so they make good cancer targets. You have probably even heard jondoeuk gushing about development on various neoantigen-based treatments. :) But it sounds like you may be struggling with the question: How could targeting neoantigens be better than DCVax which targets all the antigens?
Short answer is, I don’t think it is a better approach than DCVax. But T-cell treatments have been all the rage since the CAR-T treatments Kymriah and Yescarta were approved in 2017, and there is a general belief that T-cell therapy is more effective than a dendritic cell therapy, which hasn’t been proven in clinical trials, or commercially approved (yet). (well other than Provenge and exwannabe’s favorite - Apceden)
So with this in mind, the BATON system was designed in 2016 to make a T-cell therapy. It uses the dendritic cells to load the T-cells with multiple neoantigens (rather than a single antigen like CAR-T’s) that are specific to each person’s tumor, and then cultures those activated T-cells. It’s a more natural, faster, and far less expensive method of manufacturing a T-cell treatment than engineering the T-cells, and it’s also potentially more effective and durable since it targets multiple antigens to prevent escape.
I think this system is really brilliant, and it could add value to Northwest Bio at some point down the road. Northwest Bio could develop a T-cell therapy, which could be used as a mono-therapy, or it could be combined with DCVax as a dendritic-cell vaccine shot and a T-cell infusion, or it could be combined with checkpoint inhibitors, etc., or the manufacturing system could be licensed.
