Yup Dhm - I do believe you are correct there.
When Yuman developed CF-33 he actually produced around 100 virus strains, and tested them all for lethality against cancer, and for safety against ordinary tissue. CF-33 came out as best and was selected for further development but another virus - CF-17 - was a close runner up.
Vaxinia and Check-vacc became the first two products derived from the original CF-33, with OnCARlytics following soon after. As we know, Check-vacc is being trialled in breast cancer and Vaxinia is being trialled against a wide range of solid tumour types.
I knew that Yuman and his team had also conducted pre-clinical studies of CF-33 as a treatment for
intra-peritoneal metastatic cancer. I posted on that here on HC at the time. Metastatic intra-peritoneal cancers are secondary tumours that have spread from a primary cancer elsewhere (eg ovarian or colo-rectal cancer), and infiltrated the peritoneal cavity. They can be widespread and impossible to treat through direct injection, and even IV treatment would be ineffective.
The results of that research were very positive and you can read about it here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37019471/
So I was interested and slightly puzzled when I noticed a related study by Prof Fong and his team using CF17, instead of CF33. Again, the results were very positive:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37915757/
Curious about this, I wrote to the company and I received a very prompt, informative and polite reply from Leslie Chong.
Leslie's exact words are:
"I received your inquiry and wanted to reply to this myself as I’ve just had a meeting with Prof. Fong.
As we have an FDA IND (Investigational New Drug) with CF33 and this is patient trials, any pre-clinical or clinical work has to be reported to the FDA reported under this IND so Prof. Fong wanted to use CF17 in lieu of CF33 to conduct further experiments as CF17 behaves like CF33.
As expected, he got great results with CF17 and has published. IMU has the first rights to this, if we wanted to further develop CF17 as a drug however, CF33 is so much more advanced in the clinic and we believe more potent than CF17 and we would rather spend the funds on development of CF33."
This makes excellent sense to me. The intra-peritoneal research is extremely encouraging and it may well end up as a new line of treatment - but it is not the key priority right now. Rather than add the additional work of running this research past the FDA, Yuman is using CF17 instead, because the two virus strains are closely related and behave in a similar manner.
This way, they can get "proof of concept" more rapidly, and without distracting the FDA. Of course, assuming the Vaxinia trial continues to be successful, I think it is highly likely that they will eventually conduct a formal trial of Vaxinia against intra-peritoneal cancer. That's the sort of thing we might expect to see happen after the (hopefully successful) expansion of the current MAST trial against Biliary Cancer.
It just goes to further demonstrate that CF-33 has an
enormous range of potential applications. If IMU gets FDA approval for Vaxinia to be marketed for use against Biliary Cancer then that will be a massive commercial win, but it will also just be step 1. IMU (and/or a likely commercial partner by that stage) will expand the range of applications one by one, and I think intra-peritoneal cancer will be included in that list because this latest paper by Yuman and his team states: "
These preclinical results inform the design of future clinical trials of CF17 for peritoneal-directed therapy in GCPM patients."
For CF17 - substitute CF33....
It happens to be cloudy here in the Northern Rivers today, but I see blue sky ahead for Imugene...
Cheers
Dave
(20min delay)