AltRNA8V antigens for Cancer Vaccines

The COVID pandemic has unsurprisingly awakened new interest in the power of vaccine technologies. One disease area where vaccination holds particular promise is cancer. Cancer remains a major problem, with one in every two people in the UK now predicted to get cancer in their lifetimes. This has a considerable impact on individual lives and livelihoods, exerts extreme pressures on our stretched healthcare system, and represents a significant economic burden on our society.

AilseVax Ltd is a spin-out company from the Queen's University Belfast focused on the development of novel cancer vaccine technologies with broad applicability for the treatment of multiple cancers, which avoid the need for individual personalised vaccine design and have potential to augment efficacy of immunotherapies.

Current cancer vaccine development is focussed on highly personalized cancer vaccines, where, upon diagnosis, the individual patient's tumour genome is sequenced, compared to the patient's normal blood for identification of tumour-specific mutations, then putative neo-antigens are manufactured into a completely bespoke vaccine. Whilst this approach has yielded therapeutic effects, it is complex, lengthy, and exceptionally costly and therefore prohibitively expensive to implement in most international healthcare settings, including the NHS.

Our overall goal is to develop a novel cancer vaccine discovery pipeline based on the premise that abnormalities in gene expression in cancers leads to expression of tumour-specific vaccine targets (antigens), which are common and predictable across a range of tumour types in different patients. This is enabled by a novel technology platform that leverages cutting-edge sequencing and data analysis methods that allow us to identify novel "cryptic" targets for cancer vaccines that have not been looked at before.

These antigens can form the basis of next-generation vaccines, where immunization of patients will trigger a tumour-selective immune response towards these abnormal cells. This novel, broad-spectrum cancer vaccine approach will be cheaper, simpler to manufacture (scalable) and easier to use clinically compared to completely individualized vaccines being developed by competitors. This is because our approach has potential for a single vaccine to have broad application across a range of tumour types (and therefore patients). These "broad spectrum" vaccines will have better cost-benefit ratios and have the potential to be more widely adopted due to their broad applicability to multiple rather than individual patients, improving therapeutic outcomes for drug resistant and recurrent cancers where there are clear clinical and thus market needs.