Replies to post #616420 on NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[ADVFN_doclee]

I've had an email from Immucura in response to my enquiry. The salient information is:

The method was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2011 and since then it has been on the private market - offered by different companies in different type of packages. It has saved many people´s lives.
In short - the laboratory is activating patient´s dendritic cells with patient´s cancer antigens that are also present in the blood of that patient. They are creating a very powerful ´serum´ with millions of those dendritic cells activated against the cancer. When this serum is injected back in to the patient - it is stimulating patient´s immune system to finally fight against the cancer. The cancer stops being ´´invisible´´ to the immune system. There is no side effects to this treatment - it can basically only help.

It wasn't the method itself that won the 2011 Nobel Prize for Medicine; the prize was awarded to "...... and to Dr Ralph M. Steinman for his discovery of dendritic cells and their role in adaptive immunity".

It would seem likely that in Immucura's treatment the dendrocytes are harvested in a similar way to that used by NWBO - leukopheresis for the monocytes (immature dendrocytes) which are then matured, as per NIH information, .... into immunostimulatory DCs by the inflammatory cytokines TNF-a and IL-1, by LPS and by CD40 ligand (CD40L) (or something similar).

The obvious difference between Immucura's method and DCVax-L is that the sensitising process does not involve the dendrocytes exposure to a whole tumour lysate (where they are exposed to the full panoply of tumour antigens). Instead they are activated by circulating tumour antigens which have leaked into the circulation.

Such circulating tumour antigens (or other substances derived from the body's own reaction to the tumour) are usually called biomarkers and are commonly used in the diagnosis of malignant disease (with varying degrees of specificity). There is no biomarker test for GBM.

From a quick trawl of the literature, I could find no mention of actual circulating GBM cells or antigens in the bloodstream. That there are circulating cancer cells in some forms of cancer is indisputable - [ Angle plc has developed a simple lab-based in vitro system ("Parsortix") for isolating such circulating cancer cells which can then be identified and characterised etc without the need for biopsy] - so it is feasible that Immucura's method might work for some tumours which are so advanced as to be spewing out malignant cells into the bloodstream. However, without an actual clinical trial to establish the efficacy of Immucura's treatment I personally am a bit sanguine that in GBM there would be sufficient circulating tumour cells to sensitize the dendrocytes solely from incubation (or whatever) with the patients blood.

Of course, I stand to be corrected if that pronouncement turns out to be at fault.