AltRNA8V antigens for Cancer Vaccines

不出所料，COVID大流行唤醒了人们对疫苗技术力量的新兴趣。接种疫苗特别有希望的一个疾病领域是癌症。癌症仍然是一个主要问题，现在每两个英国人中就有一个人预计会在他们的一生中患上癌症。这对个人生活和生计产生了相当大的影响，对我们本已不堪重负的医疗保健系统施加了极大的压力，并对我们的社会构成了重大的经济负担。AilseVax Ltd是一家从贝尔法斯特女王大学分拆出来的公司，专注于开发具有广泛适用性的新型癌症疫苗技术，用于治疗多种癌症，避免了个性化疫苗设计的需要，并有可能增强免疫疗法的疗效。目前的癌症疫苗开发重点是高度个性化的癌症疫苗，在诊断后，对个体患者的肿瘤基因组进行测序，与患者的正常血液进行比较，以确定肿瘤特异性突变，然后将假定的新抗原制造成完全定制的疫苗。虽然这种方法产生了治疗效果，但它复杂、耗时长，而且成本极高，因此在大多数国际医疗保健机构（包括NHS）实施起来代价高昂。我们的总体目标是基于癌症中基因表达异常导致肿瘤特异性疫苗靶点（抗原）表达的前提，开发一种新的癌症疫苗发现管道，抗原在不同患者的一系列肿瘤类型中是常见的和可预测的。这是由一种新的技术平台实现的，该平台利用了尖端的测序和数据分析方法，使我们能够识别以前从未研究过的癌症疫苗的新型“隐藏”靶点。这些抗原可以构成下一代疫苗的基础，患者的免疫接种将触发针对这些异常细胞的肿瘤选择性免疫反应。与竞争对手正在开发的完全个性化的疫苗相比，这种新型的广谱癌症疫苗方法将更便宜，更容易制造（可扩展），更容易在临床上使用。这是因为我们的方法有可能使单一疫苗广泛应用于各种肿瘤类型（因此也适用于患者）。这些“广谱”疫苗将具有更好的成本效益比，并有可能得到更广泛的采用，因为它们广泛适用于多名而非个别患者，从而改善具有明确临床和市场需求的耐药和复发性癌症的治疗结果。

The COVID pandemic has unsurprisingly awakened new interest in the power of vaccine technologies. One disease area where vaccination holds particular promise is cancer. Cancer remains a major problem, with one in every two people in the UK now predicted to get cancer in their lifetimes. This has a considerable impact on individual lives and livelihoods, exerts extreme pressures on our stretched healthcare system, and represents a significant economic burden on our society.AilseVax Ltd is a spin-out company from the Queen's University Belfast focused on the development of novel cancer vaccine technologies with broad applicability for the treatment of multiple cancers, which avoid the need for individual personalised vaccine design and have potential to augment efficacy of immunotherapies.Current cancer vaccine development is focussed on highly personalized cancer vaccines, where, upon diagnosis, the individual patient's tumour genome is sequenced, compared to the patient's normal blood for identification of tumour-specific mutations, then putative neo-antigens are manufactured into a completely bespoke vaccine. Whilst this approach has yielded therapeutic effects, it is complex, lengthy, and exceptionally costly and therefore prohibitively expensive to implement in most international healthcare settings, including the NHS.Our overall goal is to develop a novel cancer vaccine discovery pipeline based on the premise that abnormalities in gene expression in cancers leads to expression of tumour-specific vaccine targets (antigens), which are common and predictable across a range of tumour types in different patients. This is enabled by a novel technology platform that leverages cutting-edge sequencing and data analysis methods that allow us to identify novel "cryptic" targets for cancer vaccines that have not been looked at before.These antigens can form the basis of next-generation vaccines, where immunization of patients will trigger a tumour-selective immune response towards these abnormal cells. This novel, broad-spectrum cancer vaccine approach will be cheaper, simpler to manufacture (scalable) and easier to use clinically compared to completely individualized vaccines being developed by competitors. This is because our approach has potential for a single vaccine to have broad application across a range of tumour types (and therefore patients). These "broad spectrum" vaccines will have better cost-benefit ratios and have the potential to be more widely adopted due to their broad applicability to multiple rather than individual patients, improving therapeutic outcomes for drug resistant and recurrent cancers where there are clear clinical and thus market needs.