New member for Prima board

Prima BioMed (ASX:PRR) has appointed Australian scientist and entrepreneur Dr Russell J Howard to its board as a non-executive director.

Howard was the overall winner of the 2013 Advance Global Australian Award for his impact on global biotechnology and green chemistry fields.

A pioneer in molecular parasitology research, in particular malaria research, Howard worked at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne before embarking on a career in the US.

He was based at the US National Institutes of Health before moving into industry, where he was involved in the discovery and commercialisation of ‘gene shuffling’ or ‘molecular breeding’ - a technique that uses DNA recombination to generate new gene sequences that may lead to the production of proteins with improved function.

Howard was co-founder and CEO of Maxygen, the biopharmaceutical company spun out from Affymax-GlaxoWellcome, and took gene shuffling to commercialisation. He led Maxygen’s US$260 million ($255.2 million) IPO and secondary capital raising. He is also an adviser to Victorian-based biological drug developer Circadian Technologies (ASX: CIR) and executive chairman of NeuClone, a Sydney-based company with a focus on producing monoclonal antibody and protein drugs.

Matthew Lehman, CEO of Prima Biomed since September last year and based in the San Francisco Bay area, was in Australia this week for the announcement.

Prima’s lead product in development is the cancer vaccine CVac, which is being trialled in patients with ovarian cancer. 

Interim data from a 63-patient phase 2b study on CVac showed that patients receiving the vaccine had a moderate improvement (20-30%) in progression-free survival.

“This trial is expected to report in the second half of 2013,” said Lehman. “This will validate our phase 2/3 CANVAS trial and inform its statistical design. We are rolling out the CANVAS trial in a controlled way because we want to see the phase 2b results first.”

About 100 hospitals are enrolled on the phase 2/3 CANVAS study and about 40 patients have been screened to date.

Lehman said they will be progressively adding hospitals to the trial this year and they are looking for more hospitals to be involved.

Prima BioMed shares were trading 13.25% higher at $0.094 as of around 2 pm on Wednesday.