Project description
Frame-shift mutation based anticancer vaccination
Immunotherapy shows impressive potential for cancer treatment. This approach involving the general activation of the immune system would benefit dramatically if combined with tumour-specific vaccination. This is now possible with technology enabling routine sequencing of the entire tumour DNA within two weeks. Frame Cancer Therapeutics has developed a new kind of personalised anticancer vaccine based on shared neoantigens induced by frameshift mutations. These sequences are not normally expressed, and are thus attacked by the immune system, enabling specific vaccines for different tumour types. The EU-funded project focuses on the development of specific sets of vaccines for cancers according to their shift-mutations, providing an effective and less-expensive approach compared to point-mutation based neoantigen vaccination.
Objective
Frame Cancer Therapeutics is a Dutch start-up that develops effective vaccines against cancer, based on frameshift mutations. Driven by the ambition to provide a therapeutic effect for up to 50% of all cancers, Frame aims to alter the status quo of cancer treatment. Our balanced team consists of top researchers and successful biotech entrepreneurs with a track record including the CEO of Crucell , and founder of ProQR.
The clinical use of so-called checkpoint inhibitors, which activate the immune system, has shown great effects, particularly for treatment of advanced melanoma. Yet, a large group of cancer patients does not benefit from this treatment alone, and the next step is to combine this general activation of the immune system with tumor-specific vaccination. This has just become possible now that entire tumor DNA sequences get to be routinely read within two weeks, as part of clinical care.
The solution that Frame Cancer Therapeutics has developed is a ground-breaking strategy for anti-cancer vaccination using off-the-shelf yet personalized cancer vaccines derived from frameshift mutations. Frame Therapeutics has discovered FRAMES, a source of shared neoantigens induced by frame-shift mutations with unique therapeutic potential. These sequences are usually not expressed in the healthy body, and thus seen as foreign by the immune system. A licensed sets of FRAMES are each specific vaccines for different tumor types (such as breast, lung, kidney, colon, uterine cancer).
Most cancer vaccination strategies are based on point mutations unique for each tumor, requiring costly individualized vaccine manufacturing. Frame Therapeutics is the first company entirely focusing on the development of cancer vaccines based on FRAMES, offering off-the-shelf personalized cancer vaccines. This approach allows for economics of scale, reducing time to treatment from months to days, which is critical to patient health, and which will imprcost/benefit ratio’s.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managemententrepreneurship
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncologyskin cancermelanoma
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunology
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugsvaccines
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsmutation
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
1098 XG AMSTERDAM
Netherlands
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.