Oegstgeest, The Netherlands, May 04, 2021 – ISA announces publication in Nature Reviews Cancer of a review of therapeutic cancer vaccines. The paper is co-authored by ISA’s Chief Scientific Officer, Prof. Cornelis “Kees” Melief in collaboration with key opinion leaders at international institutions including the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, the Parker Institute of Cancer Immunotherapy, San Francisco, and the Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands. This is the link to the online article.

The Nature Reviews Cancer paper summarizes key insights gleaned from previous successful and non-successful therapeutic vaccine trials. It provides an overview of the numerous mechanisms cancer cells use to evade treatment as well as strategies that can be utilized to significantly enhance clinical efficacy of immunotherapies. ISA’s on-going clinical trials are based on this state-of-the art scientific knowledge.

Prof. Kees Melief, Chief Scientific Officer at ISA Pharmaceuticals, said: “Therapeutic cancer vaccines have undergone a resurgence in the past years. This paper highlights key cancer vaccine trials with clinical impact and provides insight on how to improve crucial T cell immune responses and co-treatment for clinical success. Our Synthetic Long Peptide (SLP®) technology is amongst the most successful platforms. We have safely completed multiple human clinical studies in hundreds of patients, showing a consistently positive correlation between the size of the vaccine-induced immune response and the clinical response.”

Gerben Moolhuizen, Chief Executive Officer of ISA Pharmaceuticals, said: “Scientific knowledge advances through publications and collaborations. We are delighted to have contributed to this paper in Nature Reviews Cancer, co-authored with scientists at prestigious international institutions in the US and The Netherlands. This paper summarises important lessons learned from over a decade of scientific research in the field. It shows that targeted activation of the immune system by therapeutic vaccines can play an important role in beating cancer. We see our SLP therapeutics as a key immunotherapy platform with the potential to substantially improve the treatment of patients with cancer and infectious diseases.”

ISA’s product portfolio consists of multiple SLP therapeutics for cancer and infectious diseases. Its SLP approach is designed to unleash a durable and broad T cell immune response to specific diseases. It enables a patient’s own immune system to attack and destroy tumour cells or viruses for significant clinical benefit.