Virax booms on cancer vaccine trial news

By Melissa Trudinger
Wednesday, 03 March, 2004

Virax's share price has soared after the company disclosed that French biotech company Transgene recently reported promising interim results from Phase II trials of a cancer therapeutic vaccine based on the Virax's Co-X-Gene technology.

The cancer vaccine, MVA-Muc1-IL2, is one of two products developed by the French company that utilise both an antibody-stimulating antigen and a T cell stimulating cytokine packaged into a recombinant virus -- the technology platform patented by Virax. The company also has a vaccine that targets human papillomavirus and its associated cancers, which is also undergoing Phase II testing.

Transgene's results, announced in February, showed encouraging tumour response rates in lung cancer in combination with chemotherapy, and a significant decrease in PSA progression rates in its prostate cancer trial. Stabilisation of disease was also observed in almost half of the patients enrolled to date in a kidney cancer trial.

Virax CEO David Beames said the two companies had been aware of each other for some time and had engaged in preliminary discussions over the last couple of years. "[The results] take Transgene one step closer to requiring a license from Virax," he said.

While Transgene is a bigger company than Virax, Beames said that it would still probably require a partner to take it through Phase III trials. He said it was likely that partnering discussions at Transgene would facilitate licensing discussions between the two companies.

Just as importantly as the licensing prospects, Beames said, was that the results validated the immunotherapeutic approach used by both companies. Virax recently reported promising results from its Phase I/IIa clinical trial for its VIR201 HIV therapeutic, which reduced viral loads in patients, and is planning a larger trial.

"Our results are good for them, and their results are good for us," Beames said. "It's really quite encouraging for us -- we're very pleased at their success."

At the time of writing, Virax was trading at AUD$0.60.