novel canine cancer vaccine gets green light

Novel canine cancer vaccine gets green light
for commercialisation in USA
Sydney, Australia – 14 November 2013

Regenerative medicine company, Regeneus, announced today that it has received written confirmation
from the Center for Veterinary Biologics at the US Department of Agriculture that it can proceed with the
commercialisation of its novel canine cancer vaccine in the USA. The cancer vaccine uses a dog’s own
tumour proteins as the source of the biological therapy.
“This is exciting news as it means we have an accelerated pathway to make our autologous vaccine
available to treat dogs with life threatening cancerous tumours in the USA” said Dr Duncan Thomson, Head
of Veterinary Health at Regeneus. According to the National Canine Cancer Foundation, cancer
accounts for almost half of the deaths of pets over 10 years of age, which is roughly the same rate as
humans. “The next step is to finalise the planning and initiate our US based marketing study which will
generate important data to support the commercialisation of the cancer vaccine. The study is scheduled
to commence in early 2014.”
The vaccine involves removal of a tumour or biopsy from the dog in order to produce a personalised
vaccine. The vaccine stimulates the dog’s immune system to see the cancer cells as foreign and helps
prevent further growth of the tumour as well as development of new tumours.
The technology was developed by Professor Ross Davey and Dr Chris Weir at the Bill Walsh Translational
Cancer Research Laboratories which is part of the Kolling Institute of Medical Research (Kolling) at the
Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. Regeneus has an exclusive worldwide licence for commercialisation
of the technology for veterinary applications and an option over all human applications.
The vaccine has been through extensive pre-clinical testing at the Kolling which demonstrated that it
could induce remission or significantly slow tumour growth in an aggressive glioma animal model. The
Kolling research will be published in a peer reviewed journal in early 2014.
Since March 2011, Dr Weir has prepared as part of an ethics approved study, personalised vaccines to
treat 40 dogs with a range of life threatening tumours. Cancers treated include melanoma, bone cancer
and liver cancer. Dr Weir said: “the study demonstrated that there were no adverse side effects from the
vaccine and over 80% of dogs treated had increased survival times as compared to published survival
data for these types of cancer. I’m confident that we’ll see positive results from the controlled study
planned for early next year.”
Professor Graham Vesey, CEO of Regeneus said: “ the success of the vaccine to date in a variety of hard
to treat cancers in dogs bodes well for a clinical study of the vaccine for human cancer in the near
future.”