A Therapeutic mRNA Vaccine for Ovarian Cancer

Epithelial ovarian cancer accounts for 90% of all ovarian cancer cases and of these \>50% are the High Grade Serious Carcinomas (HGSC) which is highly aggressive. With no symptoms, most patients are diagnosed at stage 3 or 4 where the 5-year survival rates are only 15%. Given that worldwide, there are 600,000 women living within 5 years with ovarian cancer and that the Globocan study predicts that there will be a 55% increase in annual incidence to \>370,000 and deaths to 67% by 2035, there is a need to create a vaccine that can treat the disease and reduce the mortality and that is the main focus of this project.

To make a vaccine therapeutic a particular type of immunity is required known as a CD8+ response. Phion Therapeutics have created a vaccine that produces a CD8+ response. We get this response because we can deliver the vaccine into the correct cells using a cell penetrating peptide as a delivery vehicle. We are the only company to have this peptide to deliver the vaccine. The vaccine itself is a genetic cargo (mRNA) designed to code for two tumour associated antigens in HGSC. To date, we have produced and published data proving our prototype vaccine can eradicate target infected cells in vivo. This project is designed to understand the immune response from our dual antigen vaccine, determine the best dose and administration regime to regress HGSC in recommended pre-clinical animal models. The vision is to take our technology along the development pipeline so that by the end of the 18 months we are ready to commence large-scale toxicology studies. The data pack achieved from this project is essential for us to raise further funds for these toxicology studies and this is also critical for the success of phion's internal pipeline of projects.

This is a highly innovative project as the first of its kind peptide/mRNA vaccine that can be used to treat HGSC. Additionally, key information from this project can be applied to build therapeutic vaccines for other tumours such as pancreatic, triple negative breast and castrate resistant prostate cancers. The development of the technology in this project could be the catalyst for a new generation of vaccines based upon specific cancer antigens. In addition, this investment represents a significant commercial opportunity for pHion, further strengthening the UK's position in the gene therapy market with potential for global exploitation.