Jondoeuk, your claim that “not a single patient responded” is not only inaccurate, it grossly misrepresents the very paper you linked.
Let’s start with the trial design. The DCVax-Direct study was a Phase I, single-arm, dose-escalation trial. It was not intended to demonstrate tumor shrinkage. Its goals were safety, feasibility, and identification of immune activity. This is standard for Phase I trials in immunotherapy.
The patients in this trial were not early-stage. They were end-stage, with unresectable solid tumors, most having failed multiple prior treatments. And only a single tumor per patient was injected. No chemotherapy. No checkpoint inhibitors. No systemic drugs. This was a pure test of whether autologous dendritic cells injected into a tumor could trigger immune activity.
Now look at Table 3. You cited it to make your point, but did you actually read it?
Patient 1, with pancreatic cancer, survived 48.5 months.
Patient 3, with soft tissue sarcoma, survived 24.0 months.
Patient 12, with neuroendocrine cancer of the pancreas, survived 45.5 months.
Patient 13, with melanoma, survived 45.0 months.
Patient 15, with cholangiocarcinoma, survived 21.8 months.
Patient 19, with a lung neuroendocrine tumor, survived 42.6 months.
Patient 22, with ovarian cancer, survived 42.5 months.
Patient 23, with NSCLC, survived 34.7 months.
Patient 25, with soft tissue sarcoma, survived 13.4 months.
Patient 26, with bladder cancer, survived 22.0 months.
Patient 27, with a neuroendocrine tumor, survived 28.6 months.
Patient 29, with pancreatic cancer, survived 17.4 months.
Patient 31, with soft tissue sarcoma, survived 15.4 months.
Patient 32, with soft tissue sarcoma, survived 36.2 months.
Patient 33, with metastatic colorectal cancer, survived 41.0 months.
Patient 34, with colorectal cancer, survived 16.1 months.
Patient 35, with breast cancer, survived 16.3 months (lost to follow-up).
Patient 36, with melanoma, survived 45.1 months.
Patient 39, with soft tissue sarcoma, survived 15.1 months.
These were not borderline cases. They were advanced-stage cancers, inoperable and often metastatic, treated with nothing but a direct injection into a single tumor site. Many of these patients had stable disease at 8 weeks. Several were still alive at the time of data cutoff. Their survival durations were not marginal. They were multiple years in cases where a few months would have been expected.
The publication also directly links the biology to the outcomes. The authors report that higher secretion of TNF alpha by the injected dendritic cells was statistically associated with achieving stable disease. Higher levels of IL-8 and IL-12p40 secretion were statistically associated with longer survival. These correlations were not incidental. They were consistent and statistically significant.
The Kaplan-Meier survival analysis demonstrated that patients with stable disease at 8 weeks lived significantly longer than those who progressed. The cutoff was not chosen arbitrarily. Eight weeks was a predefined benchmark for assessing disease control in the absence of tumor shrinkage, which is known to be an unreliable measure in early immune-based therapies.
In addition to survival data, the study includes biopsy evidence. Many tumors developed increased T cell infiltration after injection, including CD8-positive killer cells and CD4-positive helper cells. This shows that the immune system was activated and entered the tumor microenvironment. PD-L1 expression increased in many tumors, further indicating immune engagement. These are not generic signs of inflammation. They are hallmark indicators of a system-level antitumor immune response.
You also ignore that 27 of the 39 evaluable patients were still alive at 18 months. These were not patients with easy-to-treat disease. They were heavily pretreated, end-stage cancer patients with no systemic therapy in the trial. The survival signal here cannot be explained away.
And all of these results occurred without the use of the four booster agent classes that the company now considers central to its next-generation approach. As described in the June 2025 NYAS presentation, those four classes are: TLR agonists, biological response modifiers, activators of antiviral pathways, and danger signals . The Phase I responders achieved long-term survival without any of these augmentations. The implication is clear: the results jondoeuk is dismissing came from baseline DC potency alone, not a boosted system. The next-generation design builds on that immune signal with targeted amplification.
The trial did not fail. It succeeded in identifying an immune mechanism. It showed safety, feasibility, immune activation, and extended survival in a subset of patients whose immune profiles aligned with the dendritic cell product’s cytokine potency.
That is why ATLnsider was right to challenge your statement. The trial generated survival outliers and immune biomarkers in line with modern immunotherapy understanding. And now that foundation is being advanced.
The next-generation DCVax-DR trial will inject multiple tumors per patient instead of just one. It will combine with those same booster agent classes, TLR agonists, biological response modifiers, activators of antiviral pathways, and danger signals, to enhance dendritic cell activation and broaden systemic immune engagement.
You’re treating DCVax-Direct as if it failed to do something it was never designed to do. You’re ignoring what it actually proved. You’re looking at a Phase I immune activation study and expecting Phase III chemotherapy results.
This is not a case of no response. This is a case of systemic immune activation from localized dendritic cell injection, with survival benefit tied to mechanistic biomarkers and immune activity in biopsied tumor tissue.
So the question is not what Table 3 failed to show. The question is why you’re pretending it didn’t show what it clearly did.
You are not interpreting the data. You are denying it.
At a certain point, this kind of denial is no longer a misunderstanding of the data. It’s a defense of a narrative that was never about the science to begin with.
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