I Corps: Development of Genome Edited Cancer Vaccines

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to bring a novel cancer immunotherapy vaccine to the market for treating solid and metastatic tumors. Solid tumors exhibit the highest rates of incidence and mortality in the United States for the past few decades. Many of the newest advancements in immunotherapy, including bi-specific antibodies and CAR-T cell therapy have shown minimal effect on solid tumors. The vaccine invented by this group fills the gap by providing a personalized immunotherapy vaccine that can stop or reduce the progression of the cancer and prevent its recurrence. It will save millions of lives by treating those incurable cancers with this newly developed vaccine. The plan is to investigate its customer segments, to discover its market, and to understand its regulatory approval processes. The initial customer discovery will be the focus of the NSF I-Corps Short Course, followed by a market discovery and a strategy to raise funds for bringing the vaccine to the market.This I-Corps project is to commercialize an immunotherapy vaccine that was developed based on a discovery made by this group, where genome edited tumor cells were found to elicit a strong immunogenicity against solid tumors, thereby functioning like a vaccine. The initial animal studies supported the feasibility of this approach. Building upon tremendous advances in cancer immunotherapy and genome editing, this vaccine synergistically combines CRISPR genome editing, vaccinations, and personalized medicine to fully activate a patient's immune system against cancer recurrence. This is the first engineered tumor vaccine that prevents cancer cells from evading the immune system. Unlike conventional cancer therapy, it does not have severe off-target side effects. While cancer vaccines have been explored extensively, their clinical development has seen a long lag phase due to hurdles in regulatory approvals and their adoption into existing therapy regimes. The vaccine developed by this group will overcome these hurdles.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.