I have been busy the past few days and haven’t been able or motivated enough to put a real post together. So this morning, after being reminded that I had left MedImmune off the Companies list (which is one of the most popular Pages on the Blog in terms of hits), I wanted to take a step back to a press release from Feb. 6th from a new company started in Frederick County named Vaccinogen. This could be a really big story if they are able to demonstrate this process is effective.
Here’s the blurb from their web site:
Frederick, MD – February 6, 2008 – Cancer research pioneer Michael G. Hanna Jr. Ph.D., also Vaccinogen, Inc.’s Founder, Chairman and CEO has acquired the rights to OncoVAX®, a vaccine with the potential to prevent colon cancer from recurring in many patients.
“This agreement represents a major step forward in defeating cancer by increasing the body’s immunity to it,” said Dr. Hanna, who has been working on cancer vaccines for more than 30 years.
“This agreement represents a major step forward in defeating cancer by increasing the body’s immunity to it.”
In the agreement, Vaccinogen obtained exclusive license to OncoVAX® Active Specific Immunotherapy as well as an important component of the product TICE BCG. The vaccine is made from the patients’ own tumor and is injected back into the patient to effect an immune response against recurrence of that cancer.
The FDA views Stage II colon cancer as an unmet medical need. When colon cancer recurs after surgery it is frequently fatal. OncoVAX® prevents that recurrence and thereby reduces recurrence and deaths by over 50%. Vaccinogen is currently preparing to commercialize the vaccine in Switzerland.
I should also post an update off their web site from Feb 27th, that announces the availability of the vaccine in Europe:
Frederick, MD – February 27, 2008 –Vaccinogen, Inc. announced that its new vaccine to block colon cancer from recurring will be commercially available in Europe starting June 2008.
“This makes OncoVAX® the world’s first commercially viable vaccine for colon cancer,” said Dr. Michael G. Hanna, Jr., Ph.D., Chairman & CEO of Vaccinogen. “It is the beginning of our worldwide strategy of profitable distribution. Questions of the feasibility of patient specific anti-cancer therapies have been raised and this new European initiative will obviate these issues.”
Pro Vaccine AG, a leading Swiss-based pharmaceutical distributor, will begin distributing OncoVAX® throughout Switzerland starting with Zurich and Neuchâtel by June 2008. “We are very excited about the prospects of offering OncoVAX® to Swiss and foreign patients,” said Renato Duckeck, GM of Pro Vaccine.
Pharmacenter Hungary, a rapidly growing oncology company that commercializes a broad portfolio of oncology treatments, will begin distributing the vaccine in Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovenia starting in the third quarter of 2008. Dr. Christian Galli, Director of Business Development of Pharmacenter Hungary noted, “We recognize the excellent opportunity OncoVAX® provides us and the growing population of colon cancer patients in Eastern Europe.”
And I also wanted to go waay back to an article I started a post about in January that ran in the FNP when Vaccinogen first started. From the FNP, 1/22/08:
A company that uses a unique system to fight colon cancer has opened in Frederick.
Vaccinogen, located at 5300 Westview Drive, uses some of the patient’s own cancer cells to help cure the disease.
The company is headed by Michael Hanna, director of the National Cancer Research Center in Frederick from 1975 to 1983.
“At that time, I headed the entire operation,” he said of the cancer center. “We went from a small center to 50 buildings.”
After he left, the center’s operations were broken into several divisions, each headed by a different director, he said.
Although a resident of Bethany Beach, Del., Hanna said he is happy to be back in Frederick. It seemed the perfect place to locate the headquarters for his company.
Vaccinogen has a manufacturing plant in Emmen, Holland.
Although still undergoing studies here for approval, Vaccinogen’s system is being used in Switzerland.
“It is considered a transplant there,” Hanna said.
The immunotherapy, known as OncoVAX, follows surgery for removal of Stage II colon cancer. The tumor cells are processed in the facility in the Netherlands.
A specific vaccine is created using those cells and injected into the patient in four doses during a six-month period. The vaccine unleashes the body’s own immune system to fight cancer cells.
“It is the first time a patient-specific therapy has been successful,” Hanna said.
“We have done all the hard work. There are final clinical trials that need to be done,” he said.
Even though it was put on the fast track by the federal Food and Drug Administration, it will be four years before OncoVax could be on the market in the United States, Hanna said.
He said he would like to eventually build a manufacturing plant in the U.S., most likely in Baltimore.
“It is truly a Frederick product,” Hanna said. Research for the process began at the Frederick Cancer Research Center.
When he left the local cancer research center, Hanna ran a research institute for Litton Bionetics on individualized targeted therapy. That institute was later acquired by Azko Nobel. At that time, Hanna’s research team also developed a treatment for bladder cancer that is considered the standard for today.
Hanna acquired the OncoVaX technology and formed a company called PerImmune in 1997. In 1998, PerImmune merged with Intracel Corp., but Hanna continued to hold OncoVAX assets and formed Vaccinogen.
More than $300 million has been spent on research during the 35 years of OncoVax’s development.
Besides Switzerland, and eventually the U.S., Hanna said the company is working to market the product in Eastern Europe and other locations.
I knew a bit about the history of Vaccinogen before this story came out because we were doing a little work with their predecessor, Intracel, as they were closing up operations. Intracel also made HDL and LDL, which I believe Vaccinogen also acquired and is making today. Anyway, they have real nice History and TimeLine pages, with nostalgic pictures scrolling across the top of their About Us page.
So here’s where the story gets real interesting. The whole thing started in the 60’s with the formation of Litton Bionetics, which became a popular target of the conspiracy theorists in the 90’s due to their links with the military and germ warfare. It is a documented fact that Litton Bionetics was a major Defense Contractor of the time and the recipient of a1970 Dept. of Defense appropriations request for 10 million dollars for a 5 year study to develop immune system targeted micro-organisms for germ warfare. What they did with the money is where people get excited.
This research was overseen by Dr. Hanna the likes of emerging giants in the field such as Dr Robert Gallo, working at the National Cancer Institute at the time. To make a long story short, the conspiracy theorists claim, amongst other things, that this group is responsible for introducing AIDS & Ebola as a contaminant in a polio or small pox vaccine used in Africa in the 70’s. The allegation is that the vaccine was contaminated with monkey retrovirus that were used in germ warfare experiments.
Quite frankly, I was expecting to do a brief post on he topic, but my research took a strange turn towards the bizarre I had not anticipated. A long, unsubstantiated rumor, or maybe just a bit more Frederick County Biotech folklore?
And I thought Stem Cells were controversial……
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