Dendritic Cell Therapies for Cancer: Biotech's Bumpy Road to the Market

Organizers

John E. Hambor, PhD

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals
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John E. Hambor is a distinguished research fellow at Boehringer Ingelheim, where he coordinates a strategic postdoctoral research program focused on developing new drug concepts in collaboration with academic investigators. He was previously a consultant with the Cell Therapy Group, specializing in stem cell-based drug discovery; CEO of CellDesign; and a developer of stem cell technologies at Pfizer, where he identified and validated new drug targets in the areas of inflammation and immunology and developed stem cell-based assays for drug efficacy and safety studies. Hambor received an MS in microbiology from Miami University of Ohio and earned a PhD in pathology from Case Western Reserve University. As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in the Department of Immunobiology, he researched the molecular basis of CD8 expression during T-cell development. He has been an adjunct assistant professor at Connecticut College since 2000, where he teaches immunology. He also serves as a member of the board of directors for the VA Connecticut Research and Education Foundation.

Jennifer Henry, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences
 

Jennifer Henry is the director of Life Sciences at the New York Academy of Sciences. Henry joined the Academy in 2009, before which she was a publishing manager in the Academic Journals division at Nature Publishing Group. She also has eight years of direct editorial experience as editor of Functional Plant Biology for CSIRO Publishing in Australia. She received her PhD in plant molecular biology from the University of Melbourne, specializing in the genetic engineering of transgenic crops. As director of Life Sciences, she is responsible for developing scientific symposia across a range of life sciences, including biochemical pharmacology, neuroscience, systems biology, genome integrity, infectious diseases and microbiology. She also generates alliances with organizations interested in developing programmatic content.

Speakers

Richard L. Edelson, MD

Yale School of Medicine
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Richard L. Edelson is a graduate of the Yale University School of Medicine. He trained in internal medicine at the University of Chicago and in dermatology at Harvard University and completed a dual fellowship in the Immunology Laboratory of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, and the Medical Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute, NIH. He was the originator of extracorporeal photochemo-therapy (ECP), the first FDA-approved cellular immunotherapy for cancer, which to date has been administered as a primary treatment for T-cell lymphoma and as a therapy for graft-versus-host disease and organ transplant rejection. After a decade on the faculty of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he relocated to Yale University as professor and chairman of its Department of Dermatology in 1986. He also served as the director of the Yale University Comprehensive Cancer Center from 2003 to 2009. He has organized two past New York Academy of Sciences symposia: Antigen and Clone-Specific Immuno-regulation and Clinically Relevant Basic Biology of Cutaneous T Cell Lymphoma.

Edgar G. Engleman, MD

Stanford University School of Medicine
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Edgar G. Engleman is a professor of pathology and medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he directs the Stanford Blood Center. The center supplies blood products to Stanford and nearby community hospitals, and performs histocompatibility and genetic testing in support of the organ transplant programs at Stanford. Although his early research was directed at identifying and characterizing subsets of human T cells, for the past 25 years his group has been studying dendritic cell biology. After developing methods for isolating and arming human dendritic cells, he conceived of the idea of using these cells to vaccinate patients against their own tumors. Twenty years ago, Engleman and his collaborators at Stanford began performing dendritic cell trials in cancer patients. Based on encouraging results, he co-founded Dendreon Corporation, a biotech company dedicated to developing dendritic cell-based cancer vaccines. The company's first vaccine, Sipuleucel-T or Provenge, was approved by the FDA in 2010 for the treatment of patients with advanced prostate cancer. Engleman has co-founded several other biotech companies, including Vivo Ventures, an investment firm that invests in biomedical companies in the U.S. and China.

Thomas Felzmann, MD

Activartis Biotech GmbH, Austria
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Thomas Felzmann holds an MD from the Medical University Wien, Austria, where he also worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Immunology. His clinical training in oncology began in 1990, and in 1992 he returned to full-time research as a postdoctoral associate at the NIH. He began training in pediatric oncology in 1995 and was charged with the establishment of the Laboratory of Tumour Immunology at the St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute in Austria. Over the next 5 years his team developed a proprietary dendritic cell-based cancer vaccine technology for which patents have since been granted. In 2000 he began conducted a series of trials and in 2010 initiated a randomized efficacy study. Since 2003, the clinical development of the vaccine has been conducted by Activartis.

Lana E. Kandalaft, PharmD, MTR, PhD

University of Pennsylvania
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Lana E. Kandalaft joined the Ovarian Cancer Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 as director of clinical development and operations and as an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology with a special focus on whole tumor lysate vaccine development. Kandalaft holds a PharmD from the University of Jordan School of Pharmacy, Jordan, and a PhD in cell biology and drug delivery from the Welsh School of Pharmacy, UK. She also holds a Master's degree in translational research from the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship training at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), NIH, focusing on preclinical animal models and cancer therapeutics. She continued working at the NCI as a senior research fellow before joining the University of Pennsylvannia. She recently became the director of the Developmental Therapeutics Center at the Department of Oncology and the Ludwig Branch in Switzerland. She continues to be an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, working on whole tumor lysate vaccine approaches.

Matthew Lehman

Prima BioMed, Australia
website

Matthew Lehman is the CEO of Prima BioMed. He has experience in clinical research, development programs, and obtaining drug approval, with specific expertise in clinical development strategies, operations, and outsourcing. Lehman was previously chief operating officer for Prima BioMed and for SPRI Clinical Trials, where he managed clinical operations. He leads Prima BioMed's research and development plans and clinical trials for the CVac ovarian cancer therapy vaccine. Lehman holds an MS from Columbia University.

Gregory Lizée, PhD

MD Anderson Cancer Center
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Gregory Lizée earned his PhD at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he worked on characterizing the role of the MHC class I (MHC-I) cytoplasmic tail in murine antiviral immune responses. He since completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Surgery Branch of the National Cancer Institute, NIH, led by Dr. Steven Rosenberg and best known for their pioneering immunotherapy trials for the treatment of human cancer. In 2005, Lizée established his own research at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he has continued his mechanistic studies on human DC antigen presentation. His work on the motifs within the cytoplasmic domain of MHC-I molecules could have important implications for human cancer vaccines. More recently, Lizée has been focused on identifying MHC-I ligands directly from the surface of patient tumor cell lines and biopsies using a combined approach encompassing MS-based proteomics, genomics, and bioinformatics. The goal of this project is to develop personalized cancer vaccines that are not restricted by tumor type or patient HLA haplotype, or limited by a lack of known target antigens.

Charles A. Nicolette, PhD

Argos Therapeutics Inc.
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Charles A. Nicolette received his PhD in biochemistry and cellular and developmental biology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and completed his doctoral dissertation and postdoctoral fellowship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Nicolette was previously the director of antigen discovery for cancer vaccine development at Genzyme Corporation, where he directed pre-clinical, translational and clinical stage programs for six years. He joined Argos Therapeutics in 2003 and has overseen the development of pipeline products. He is the inventor on dozens of patent applications, primarily relating to vaccine development for malignant and infectious diseases.

Sarah J. Schlesinger, MD

The Rockefeller University
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Sarah J. Schlesinger is a research associate professor in the laboratory of cellular immunology and physiology at The Rockefeller University and a research scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, a world-renowned biomedical research institute. Schlesinger has been actively engaged in HIV/AIDS and HIV vaccine research for 10 years. She led the Dendritic Cell Program at the Division of Retrovirology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research for 12 years and is now an active member of the research team at Aaron Diamond, working to develop a vaccine to halt the spread of the AIDS epidemic.

Kris Thielemans, MD, PhD

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
publications

Kris Thielemans has been one of the first to use dendritic cells for the immunotherapy of cancer in Belgium. For more than 10 years, his lab has worked on modifying dendritic cells to make them more immunogenic against tumor antigens. Those methods of modification include mRNA electroporation and lentiviral transduction. Both the transfection conditions of mouse and human dendritic cells and the stability of the mRNA for highest possible expression have been optimized. The lab has an EU-approved GMP facility in Brussels to produce clinical-grade mRNA for use either as an API or an IMP in various clinical trials (cancer and infectious diseases).

James B. Trager, PhD

Dendreon Corporation
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James B. Trager is vice president of research at Dendreon Corporation. Trager earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the role of auto-phosphorylation on signaling by the v-src tyrosine kinase in the lab of Dr. G. Steven Martin. At Geron, Trager was part of a team that cloned hTERT, the protein component of human telomerase; identified key interactions between the protein and RNA components of the enzyme; and brought the first telomerase inhibitor to the clinic. Trager has maintained his focus on novel cancer therapeutics at Dendreon, where he is responsible for new product development, biomarker identification, and clinical immunology. He has worked to bring Provenge, the first FDA-approved cellular immunotherapy for cancer, through clinical study and to the market. Current challenges include in-depth characterization of the Provenge mechanism of action, identification of biomarkers predictive of patient response to Provenge, and development of next-generation cellular immunotherapies for cancer. Trager is a graduate of St. John's College in Santa Fe and a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic.

John S. Yu, MD

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; Immunocellular Therapeutics Ltd.
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John S. Yu is the medical director of the Brain Tumor Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and a professor and vice chair in the Department of Neurosurgery. He is conducting extensive research in immune and stem cell therapy for brain tumors. Yu received his MD from Harvard Medical School and Master's degree from the Harvard University Department of Genetics. He received neurosurgical residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he also completed a neuroscience fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health Neuroimmunology Unit and was a Culpeper Scholar in the Molecular Neurogenetics Unit. In 2006, he founded Immunocellular Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology public company focused on dendritic cell therapy for cancer.

Jennifer Cable

Jennifer Cable lives in New York City, where she experiments with different outlets to communicate science. She enjoys bringing science to scientists and nonscientists alike. She writes for Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Bitesize Bio, Under the Microscope, and the Nature New York blog. She received a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her research in investigating the structure/function relationship of proteins.