Scancell awarded £250K grant for melanoma vaccine

Grant

Scancell Ltd has been awarded a £250,000 grant by the UK’s East Midlands Development Agency to fund development of clinical grade manufacturing for its SCIB1 ImmunoBody DNA vaccine for treating advanced melanoma.

The company, which was founded in 1997 as a spin-out from the University of Nottingham, has previously raised £6.2 million in funding. In December 2006, Scancell sold its monoclonal antibody pipeline to Arana Therapeutics, an Australian biopharmaceutical specialist, allowing Scancell to concentrate on the development of its ImmunoBody cancer vaccines.

SCIB is scheduled to enter clinical trials in late 2009. Early stage melanoma is often cured by surgery but advanced disease has a very poor prognosis. SCIB1 is engineered to express TRP-2 and gp100 cytotoxic T-cell epitopes from tumour antigens. In animal models, the product prevents the development of lung metastases and significantly inhibited the growth of established tumours.

The grant will be used to help fund the preparatory programme for PhaseI/IIa clinical trials, including optimisation, GMP process manufacture, formulation, stability and scale-up, pre-clinical efficacy and safety testing and toxicology.