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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Advances in siRNA Developing Delivery Solutions

In today's featured interview from TIDES 2014, Jared A. Gollob, M.D., Vice President, Clinical Research, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. discusses exciting advances in siRNA.  He says there are several different delivery formulations and the company goes after targets they have confidence in.  He also talks about focusing on moving siRNA therapies into Phase III trials.  To learn more, watch the interview:


TIDES 2015 will take place May 3-6, 2015 in San Diego, California.  This year,John Maraganore, Ph.D.; Chief Executive Officer, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, will be giving the keynote presentation Strategies and Challenges in the Development of Oligonucleotide and Peptide Drugs: Perspectives on DrugDevice Combinations and Drug Product.  For more information about this session and the rest of the program, download 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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Application Space for Peptides

In today's featured interview from TIDES 2014, Patrick C. Reid, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, PeptiDream, Inc of Japan talks about how a lot of work involving peptides are not published yet. That kind if info is obtained in this type of conference. He also states that the therapeutic side has commercial potential, application space for peptides are limitless, and that he does not see any disease that can’t be therapeutically targeted with peptides. He expects peptides to represent against therapeutic modality. To learn more, watch the interview here:


TIDES 2015 will take place May 3-6, 2015 in San Diego, California.  This year, Ravi S. Harapanhalli, Ph.D., Vice President, Technical, PAREXEL International and Former Branch Chief, Office of New Drug Quality Assessment, US FDA, will be on hand to present Strategies and Challenges in the Development of Oligonucleotide and Peptide Drugs: Perspectives on DrugDevice Combinations and Drug Product.  For more information about this session and the rest of the program, download 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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[Video] ALN-TTR Programs for Transthyretin Amyloidosis

In today's featured presentation from TIDES 2014, Jared A. Gollob, M.D., Vice President of Clinical Research at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. presents how explains how Transthyretin Amyloidosis is formed and how it develops throughout the body.  Transthyretin (TTR) amyloidosis is caused by the deposition of liver-derived mutant and/or wild-type TTR in peripheral nerves, GI tract and the heart. Patisiran (ALN-TTR02), which is being developed for familial amyloidotic polyneuropathy (FAP), is a systemically administered lipid nanoparticle (LNP) formulation of a small interfering RNA (siRNA) targeting wild-type and all mutant forms of TTR that is currently in Phase 3. ALN-TTRsc, which is being developed to treat familial amyloidotic cardiomyopathy (FAC), is a subcutaneously administered N-acetylgalactosamine (GalNAc)-conjugated siRNA also targeting all forms of TTR that is currently in Phase 2. This presentation will review the clinical results to date with both patisiran and ALN-TTRsc. To learn more, watch the actual presentation:


TIDES 2015 will take place May 3-6, 2015 in San Diego, California.  This year, Ravi S. Harapanhalli, Ph.D., Vice President, Technical, PAREXEL International and Former Branch Chief, Office of New Drug Quality Assessment, US FDA, will be on hand to present Strategies and Challenges in the Development of Oligonucleotide and Peptide Drugs: Perspectives on DrugDevice Combinations and Drug Product.  For more information about this session and the rest of the program, download 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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[Video] TIDES: AZD9150 and its Effect on Tumors

In today's featured interview from TIDES 2014, David C. Blakey, Ph.D., the Chief Scientist of Oncology iMED at AstraZeneca discusses the next generation of antisense molecules, AZD9150 and its effect on tumors and why TIDES is a great place to be for the industry. He also talks about bigger traction, which tackle lower uptake tissues and a combination of both peptides and nucleotides. To learn more, watch this interview:



This year at TIDES 2015, AstraZeneca's Regina Fritsche-Danielson, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Senior Director and Head of Bioscience Heart Failure Department will present Modified mRNA as a Potential Therapeutic for Patients with Cardiovascular Disease.  For more information on this session and the rest of the program, download the agenda.  As a reader of this blog, when you register to join us and mention code XB15180BLOG, you can save 20% off the standard rate.

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[Video] Breakthrough Status: Are You Ready?

In today's featured presentation from TIDES 2014, Jeffrey Baker, Ph.D., Deputy Director, Office of Biotechnology Products, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration talks about FDA SIA (Safety and Innovation Act). He presents a rundown of this act and talks about NDAs (Non-disclosure agreement), and BLAs (Biologics License Applications). Baker states that FDA SIA has made available a pathway for rapid approval of drugs critical to public health, however companies need to be prepared to manufacture and meet patient needs. Are you ready? For details, watch the presentation:



TIDES 2015 will take place May 3-6, 2015 in San Diego, California.  This year, Ravi S. Harapanhalli, Ph.D., Vice President, Technical, PAREXEL International and Former Branch Chief, Office of New Drug Quality Assessment, US FDA, will be on hand to present Progress in Advancement of RNAi Therapeutics.  For more information about this session and the rest of the program, download 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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A look at Antisense Technologies

One of the greatest technologies to determine how to specifically treat diseases in humans, animals and plants is with antisense technologies.  These technologies, which manipulate DNA or RNA, end up interrupting the normal cellular processing to a gene and we can therefore discover what the gene functions as.  Integrated Gene Technologies recently released a white paper examining this issue.

Here is an excerpt:

Antisense Oligonucleotides

Oligonucleotide-based antisense techniques represent the most common and, to date, the most successful approach to achieving suppression or elimination of a genetic message. The antisense effect of a synthetic oligonucleotide sequence was first demonstrated in the late 1970s by Zamecnik and Stephenson [1]. Using nucleotide sequences from the 5’ and 3’ ends of the 35S RNA of Rous sarcoma virus (RSV), Zamecnik and Stephenson identified a repeated sequence of 21 nucleotides (nt) that appeared to be crucial to viral integration. They synthesized a 13-mer oligonucleotide, d(AATGGTAAAATGG), complement to a portion of this viral sequence. When this synthetic oligonucleotide sequence was introduced into cultured fibroblast cells infected with RSV, viral production was significantly inhibited. They correctly concluded that the oligonucleotide was inhibiting viral integration by hybridizing to the crucial sequences and blocking them. The term they introduced to describe such oligonucleotides was “hybridon.”

At the same time as this work was being done, other groups, notably Tennant et al. [2] and Miller et al. [3], were reporting similar effects for synthetic oligonucleotides in other systems. These results stimulated a rash of studies focusing on the ability of synthetic oligonucleotides to interfere with genetic processes. Many of theses studies failed to achieve the desired effect and it quickly became clear that there were a number of issues that needed to be addressed if synthetic oligonucleotides were to become generally useful reagents for these studies. The most immediately important of these issues was what can be called “persistence.” Synthetic oligonucleotides are foreign to the cells into which they are introduced and they immediately become prey for endogenous nucleases. If synthetic oligonucleotides were to attain the level of persistence in the cell that would be needed for them to accomplish their tasks, they would have to be protected from those endogenous nucleases. Following Kurreck [4], there are three possible sites on a nucleotide where protective modifications could be introduced (Figure 1). In both DNA and RNA nucleotides the base can be altered or changes can be effectedin the phosphate backbone. In RNA nucleotides the 2’ hydroxyl group, missing in DNA nucleotides, can also be modified. The “trick” involved in protective modifications of nucleotides is to introduce an alteration that is protective against nuclease degradation that does not, at the same time, eliminate the desired effect of the oligonucleotide sequence by blocking complementary hybridization or harming the cell. 

Read the full white paper here.

This May at the TIDES Event,we will be looking at antisense technologies in a number of presentations including Antisense Development Portfolio Advances with Richard S. Geary, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Development, Isis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Characterization of Oligonucleotide Biotherapeutics by LC/MS/MS with Pfizer. For more information on these sessions, download the agenda. If you'd like to join us at the TIDES event taking place May 12-15, 2013 in Boston, as a reader of this blog when you register to join us and mention code TIDES12JP, you'll save 20% off the standard rate!

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Peptides: Methods for Quality Control

In the white paper Quality control in peptide manufacturing: specifications for GMP peptides they address the methods to identity and define the purity and content of peptides.  There is no single test to identify a peptide, but several tests including mass spectroscopy, aminio acid analysis can be used in various aspects to identify the molecules.

The paper concludes with this summary:

Quality Control in the pharmaceutical industry is frequently associated with mundane, repetitive testing of very well established compounds and their mixtures. In the context of peptides, however, it becomes a truly challenging task for the analytical chemist, because of the complexity of the products and the processes that are used in their manufacture. In terms of GMP and peptide drug substances, it is an obligatory prerequisite to establishing a robust and reproducible manufacturing process.

This May at the TIDES event, we'll be spending three days specifically focusing on Peptide Discovery and Development and will showcasing the discover the latest advances in peptide-like scaffolds and structures and peptides as protein-protein interaction modulators to accelerate your discovery efforts and more. If you'd like to learn more about the TIDES Event taking place May 12-15, 2013, download the agenda. As a reader of this blog, when you register to join us and mention code TIDES13JP, you'll save 20% off the standard rate!

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Peptide discovery could lead to new treatments for ALS

Research funded by The ALS Association has uncovered a cellular process that may affect those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The Mayo Clinical of Jacksonville, Florida uncovered:

...when the cell's protein-making machinery latches on to this repetitive RNA, it creates a protein-like chain called a RAN-translated peptide, which the researchers have termed C9RANT. The peptide's own repetitive structure makes it stick to itself, and the researchers found clumps of the peptide in the brains of people who had died of ALS.

It is still unknown whether these peptides are contributing to disease or are uninvolved in it. But in either case, they offer researchers a specific marker for ALS caused by the C9ORF72 gene and potentially a way to measure disease activity and response to therapy.

According to PR Newswire, this is a complicated disease to track and treat but the discovery of the peptide could be a big step forward.  Funding by the ALS Association was key.

 This May at the TIDES Summit, Atlas Venture will be on hand to present The State of Venture Capital, Startups, and Funding in Oligo and Peptide Therapeutics.  During this presentation they will look at the challenges that come with the funding and leaderships that life sciences receives from venture capital   For more information on this session and the rest of the program, download the agenda.  If you'd like to join us in Boston May 12-15, 2013 at the Tides Event, as a reader of this blog, when you register to join us and mention code TIDES13JP, you'll save 20% off the standard rate!

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