Antigen Express on Cancer Immunotherapy and Peptides

In today's featured interview from TIDES 2014, Eric von Hofe, Ph.D., President, Antigen Express, Inc. discusses peptides, cancer immunotherapy, peptide vaccines, and his experience at the TIDES 2014 event. He states that peptides constitute the minimum unit required to generate in response to solid advantages when developing therapeutic materials and that peptides “rev-up” the immune system to go out to be specific canto cells. Do you want to learn more? Watch this interview:


TIDES 2015 will take place May 3-6, 2015 in San Diego, California.  At this year's event, we're offering two days of content focusing on Peptide Chemistry Manufacturing and Controls and Peptide Discovery, Preclinical and Clinical featuring insights from companies such as PolyPeptide Group, Amgen, NOXXON Pharma, Zealand Pharma and more. For more this year's program by downloading the agenda.  As a reader of this blog, when you register to join us and mention code XB15180BLOG, you can save 20% off standard rates.

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How has the field of cancer immunotherapy in general advanced over the last view years?

Next week, we're hosting the TIDES 2014 Event.  Over the next few days, we'll be going back and looking at some of the one on one interviews we conducted with our speakers.  We'll start out by looking at the conversation we had with Eric Von Hofe, President of Antigen Express.

Today, Eric answers the question:
How has the field of cancer immunotherapy in general advanced over the last view years?

His answer:
It has had a really difficult time, up until the approval of Provans for prostate cancer and Yervoy for melanoma a couple of years ago.

For the first ten years of this century, there were lots of failures in the clinic and, simply, there were a lot of things that people needed to learn in the clinic in regards to how to use these compounds. So, while most therapeutic agents produce their effects relatively quickly, either they see tumors shrinking after hemotherapeutic agents given, which is good, or it doesn’t, which is bad. Even if therapeutic agents work differently --- and the problem there is that it can take up to eight months to a year to really get the patient’s immune system revved up and able to recognize the tumor. So, that’s really a big difference. Once people started taking that into consideration in the clinic, they started seeing many more encouraging results.

The upshot of all that is that most people now agree that probably within the next ten years, immunotherapy will constitute one of the mainstays of cancer therapy. So, it is an exciting time; people are very encouraged by it.

Read Dr. Von Hofe's full interview here.

Dr. Von Hofe will present the case study Peptide-Based Vaccines in the New Era of Cancer Immunotherapy on Tuesday, May 13.  For more information on his presentation and the rest of the program, download the agenda.  As a reader of this blog, when you register to join us May 12-15 in Providence, Rhode Island, you're eligible to save 20% off the standard rate!  Simply register to join us and mention priority code XB14180BLOG.  Have any questions?  Email Jennifer Pereira.

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Why are peptides attractive as immunotherapeutic agents?

Later this month, we're hosting the TIDES 2014 Event.  Over the next few days, we'll be going back and looking at some of the one on one interviews we conducted with our speakers.  We'll start out by looking at the conversation we had with Eric Von Hofe, President of Antigen Express.

We started out by asking Eric:

Why are peptides attractive as immunotherapeutic agents?

His answer:

The main reason they are so attractive is that they represent the minimal agent needed to
generate an immune response. So, that’s always important in that if you have a lot of extra
agents, there is a potential for getting some non-specific toxic effects. The immune systemworks really just by recognizing the minimal units. By using them you know that you can getthe specific response that you want and really minimize the potential for any sort of toxic sideeffects. The other reason is that they are fully synthetic. So, they are very easy to make, very rapid and easy to scale-up and they are off-the-shelf products.

Read Dr. Von Hofe's full interview here.

Dr. Von Hofe will present the case study Peptide-Based Vaccines in the New Era of Cancer Immunotherapy on Tuesday, May 13.  For more information on his presentation and the rest of the program, download the agenda.  As a reader of this blog, when you register to join us May 12-15 in Providence, Rhode Island, you're eligible to save 20% off the standard rate!  Simply register to join us and mention priority code XB14180BLOG.  Have any questions?  Email Jennifer Pereira.

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Download the TIDES Podcast featuring: Eric von Hofe

Today's podcast features Eric von Hofe, President of Antigen Express. von Hofe discussed antigen express peptides, peptides as immunotherapeutic agents, peptide technology and much more. Check out our highlights below:

How are antigen express peptides different from other peptides tried in the clinic?

Eric: The difference of antigen express technology and earlier peptides is that they are modified to specifically activate the so called CB42 cells. In the past, people simply took unmodified peptides and combined them with general immune stimulating agents called Adjuvants. They frequently have non-specific effects. Ours have a very simple modification that helps them to very potently and specifically activate CB42 cells.


What other applications are there for antigen express peptide technology?

Eric: So the first thing is that there are lots of cancer-related targets that we can go over besides HER2. So, we’ve pre-clinically looked at a lot of compounds, like HPV related cancers. So, these are some cervical, some neck cancers also some melanoma targets. So, it’s essentially using the exact same technology platform we’ve used for our most advanced compounds. That can be applied to a variety of other cancer targets, as well. So, a variety of other ones that we’re looking at.

Download the full Podcast

Want to hear more from Antigen Express? Join Eric May 12-15 in Rhode Island at IBC's 16th Annual TIDES event.To view our full program, download our agenda. Register with priority code XB14180BLOG to save 20% off of the standard rate. We hope to see you this May!

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