Lyon, France – February 23, 2023 – ErVaccine Technologies, a French biotech company developing next-generation therapeutic vaccines and cellular immunotherapies in oncology, announced today the inaugural members of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) which is comprised of leading international experts in cancer vaccines and engineered T-cell immunotherapies.
The SAB, led by Prof. Stéphane Depil, founder of ErVaccine, will advise ErVaccine on the company’s technology resources, innovation pipeline, along with emerging trends in health care, science and technology, and the potential implications for the company.
Commenting on the appointments, ErVaccine Founder and Executive Chairman, Professor Stéphane Depil, said, “ErVaccine has strategically built its Scientific Advisory Board to provide the company with relevant and informed counsel in the months and years ahead, and help advance further to the first-in-human launch. Those leading experts will support the team to go through our next milestones from regulatory to clinical setting. We are extremely privileged to have the opportunity to work with this group of world-renowned experts!”
Inaugural members of the SAB include:
Prof. Jean-Yves Blay – Leon Bérard Cancer Centre – France
Professor Jean-Yves Blay is the Director of the Léon Bérard Cancer Centre since 2014 and President of Unicancer since 2019. He is an oncologist, researcher, and medical oncology professor at the Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University. Professor Blay is an active member of the ESMO, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association of Cancer Research. His research interests focus on clinical and basic research in sarcomas, targeted treatment of cancer, the biology of breast carcinoma and relation between tumor immunologic microenvironment and malignant cells with the goal of clinical applications in the fields of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment.
Prof. Pierre Coulie – de Duve Institute – UCLouvain – Belgium
Professor Pierre Coulie is leading a research group at the de Duve Institute and is an expert on the antigenicity and immunogenicity of human tumors. His current research deals with the immunogenicity of bladder carcinomas, particularly at the early stages of tumor development, with inflammatory cytokines production in the context of cancer and with the identification of antigens targeted by T cells in human autoimmune diseases.
Prof. Bernard Malissen – Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) – France
Professor Bernard Malissen directed the CIML from 1995 to 2005 where his team contributed to cracking the “TCR system”, the highly sophisticated molecular machinery that allows T cells to recognize the antigen and convert this information in a multitude of intracellular signals. He also studied one of the main partners of these cells, dendritic cells, which are responsible for presenting these antigens. Today, his research is focused on trying to address this complexity by combining “omics”, predictive models, patient biological samples with new computing power and digital analysis.
Prof. Stanley Riddell – Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center – US
Professor Stan Riddell is a member of the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Professor of Oncology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Professor Riddell is a world leader in developing immunotherapies, which harness the power of the immune system to fight cancers and dangerous infections. His research focuses on detailing the complex biology of immune cells called T cells and pioneering therapies that use genetically reprogrammed T cells to specifically recognize and destroy diseased cells. These therapeutic T cells target tumor antigens, using either natural molecules called T-cell receptors or synthetic molecules called chimeric antigen receptors. Chimeric antigen receptors, also known as CARs, combine elements from T-cell receptors and from other immune cell-produced antibody molecules. His team’s breakthroughs are helping researchers make progress for patients who need better therapies.
Dr Qing Wang – Complete Omics Inc. – US
Doctor Qing Wang graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a PhD, supervised by Dr. Bert Vogelstein at the School of Medicine, and an MHS in Biostatistics, supervised by Dr. Rafael Irizarry at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Before coming to the US, he obtained his BS and MS in Molecular Biology from Nankai University and trained with Dr. Tianhui Zhu, the Founding Dean of Nankai University School of Medicine. Doctor Wang is also currently pursuing an Executive MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and will obtain his degree in 2023. To date, Dr. Qing Wang has invented and patented 18 cutting-edge technologies in clinical multi-omics molecular diagnostic fields, ranging from early disease detection to companion diagnostics. Through Complete Omics Inc., Dr. Wang is working to break the boundaries between different fields in medicine and the life sciences and to comprehensively leverage the features of omics technologies to achieve improved personalized disease management and precision medicine.
About ErVaccine Technologies
ErVaccine Technologies, a preclinical stage biotechnology company, founded in October 2019 by Professor Stéphane Depil, an onco-hematologist and researcher at Centre Léon Bérard, is paving the way on new therapeutic perspectives in the treatment of cancers that respond insufficiently to current immunotherapies. Thanks to the value of using antigens derived from human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs). ErVaccine is specialized in the development of next-generation therapeutic vaccines, and modified T-cell immunotherapies, targeting new families of so-called “unconventional” tumor antigens such as those derived from endogenous retroviruses. ErVaccine Technologies determines tumor epitopes commonly shared among patients based on novel bioinformatics algorithms to identify candidate epitopes that are then validated by proteomic approaches and immunological tests. The first targeted indication is triple-negative breast cancer, with results generated in ovarian cancer, sarcoma and acute myeloid leukemia. The company is integrated within a leading comprehensive cancer center @ (CRCL/CLB, with a team of high-level experts.
https://www.ervaccinetechnologies.com/
About HERVs
About 8% of the human genome consists of sequences of retroviral origin, namely HERVs. HERVs are relics of ancient retroviral infections that affected the germ line of primates and their ancestors along the last 100 million of years. HERVs are kept silent in normal cells but can be aberrantly expressed by tumor cells. Because of their similarity to viral protein fragments recognized as foreign by the immune system, HERV-derived antigens are prime targets, shared by different tumors, for the development of novel cancer vaccines or T-cell based therapies, especially in tumors that respond poorly to current checkpoint inhibitor (anti-PD1/-PD-L1) immunotherapy approaches.
Contacts
| Ms. Nathalie Donne | Pr. Stéphane Depil |
| CEO | Executive Chairman |
| Nathalie.donne@ervaccinetechnologies.fr | Stephane.depil@ervaccinetechnologies.fr |
