AustCancer boosted by takeover target's good news

Alabama-based Galenica Pharmaceuticals has delighted its prospective new owner, Sydney oncology specialist Australian Cancer Technology(ASX:ACU), by announcing an agreement with New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre to evaluate Galenica's promising immunity enhancer GPI-0100 in several Phase II clinical trials.

AustCancer announced last month that it had bought Galenica for US$5 million, mainly through a scrip acquisition. It expects to complete the deal next month.

Since it was founded in 1996, privately financed Galenica has invested US$12 million in developing its novel vaccine adjuvant, antigen and carrier technologies, which are aimed at boosting the immune response against cancer and infectious disease.

The GPI-0100 adjuvant, its lead compound, can be conjugated to antigens to boost the body's response to vaccines, but also has therapeutic properties in its own right.

The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Centre conducted a Phase I/II clinical trial of a GPI-0100/antigen complex in prostate cancer patients last year, aimed at preventing a recurrence of cancer after conventional therapy. GPI-0100 is also being evaluated in two other Phase I trials.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham is evaluating a HER-2 vaccine containing a GPI-0100/antigen complex, as a potential treatment for breast-cancer patients who have developed resistance to the drug Herceptin. Galenica licensee Endocyte is conducting a trial of the adjuvant complexed with folate as a treatment for renal cancer.

The new Sloan-Kettering trials, which will run for 12 months, will use GPI-0100 conjugated selected, cancer-specific antigens as vaccines for patients with melanoma, sarcoma, neuroblastoma, small-cell lung cancer, and breast and ovarian cancers.

If the vaccines show promise, they will be taken into Phase II trials, involving 30 to 100 volunteer patients with cancer. Sloan-Kettering researchers will also conduct pre-clinical studies to optimise GPI-0100's adjuvant effect.

In a statement, AustCancer MD Paul Hopper described Galenica's agreement with the Sloan-Kettering as "a huge boost" to his company's aim of broadening its range of cancer therapeutics currently under development.

Currently, the only AusCancer product in clinical trials is its promising Pentrys cancer vaccine, a potential therapeutic vaccine for patients with any of a broad range of tumours that express mutant antigens of the key tumour-suppressor gene P53.