Therapeutic Antibody Generation Effort

MabVax will use its unique integrated approach to generate human antibodies that could become important therapeutic agents for several forms of cancer. Specifically, we will take advantage of the human immune response generated in cancer patients vaccinated with experimental vaccines to recover beneficial antibodies. MSKCC has clearly demonstrated that humans immunized with the selected vaccines generate an antibody response. MabVax will obtain blood lymphocytes from immunized individuals and utilize an in vitro electro-fusion process to rescue appropriate human B cell responses and generate human antibodies of the desired antigen specificity. We believe that this approach provides a significant advantage over competing technologies that rely on laborious antibody library screening or those that generate an independent human antibody response in a murine host environment. It is anticipated, that the beneficial antibodies generated by these individuals can be captured by the MabVax integrated technology and used subsequently for many patients either as stand alone therapeutic or in combination with other treatment options. Since subjects will be immunized with trivalent or tetravalent vaccines, it is anticipated that each subject generates a polyclonal antibody response generally against all 3 or 4 antigens. However, the quality and quantity of the resulting antibody response might be variable and will be distinct for each individual. The MabVax technology can take advantage of this situation and rescue antigen specific antibodies by re-stimulation with the same antigens utilized in the vaccines and parallel screening for antigen specific antibodies. Moreover, lymphocytes from multiple vaccinated patients will be utilized and the most desirable antibodies from each individual will be selected. Ultimately, a combination of antibodies that may not be present in a single individual could be selected for the development of a powerful monoclonal antibody cocktail product.