Singapore: Prima BioMed's interim data from the CAN-003 phase II clinical trial of cancer vaccine therapy, CVac, which is designed to treat epithelial ovarian cancer patients in remission after first-line or second-line therapy, has shown positive trends.  

Safety data indicate that CVac is very well tolerated as compared to observational standard of care (OSC). Preliminary intracellular cytokine staining (ICS) data in three CVac treated patients have shown a potent cytotoxic T cell response specific to mucin 1, while untreated patients did not show the same immune response.

In the near term, upon completion of the analysis, the company will release ICS data from a cohort of seven patients that have been followed for an extended period of time. Over the next year, Prima will have ICS data on all patients enrolled on the CAN-003 trial. 

CVac may be expected to confer increasing clinical benefit to patients as observation continues; the immune system takes time to build up its strongest response against tumor cells. Interim progression free survival and immune monitoring data from the CAN-003 trial demonstrate an
early profile similar to other successful immunotherapy products to treat cancer such as PROVENGE and YERVOY. While the CAN-003 data are interim stage and in a small cohort of patients, these data indicate that there are no impediments to moving the CVac clinical development program forward.

Mr Matthew Lehman, Prima's CEO said that, "We believe that the promising CAN-003 data further validate our ovarian cancer program and the CANVAS trial. We will be evaluating the potential to explore CVac in other cancer types that overexpress mucin 1 as well."