Three New Patents Covering HIV Immunotherapeutic Agents Issued.

2001 OCT 17 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- CEL-SCI Corporation announced September 19, 2001, the issuance of three new U.S. patents, further expanding the patent protection related to its HIV-1 based therapeutic and preventive vaccines.

These new patents expand their intellectual property protection to the C strain (clade) of the HIV virus, which is the most prevalent strain in the world and is also the dominant strain in the developing world.

The first patent describes an improved version of the already patented HGP-30 peptide that contains within its sequence several epitopes (small pieces of around 8-10 amino acids found within foreign proteins) against which the immune system reacts. The second patent describes the combination of this new peptide with the L.E.A.P.S. technology for better delivery and presentation to the immune system.

The third patent extends these technologies to other strains of HIV, in particular the C clade, the predominant strain found in Africa, where the rate of infection is in epidemic portions, as well as in India and China. The patent numbers and dates of issue are 6,258,945 issued July 10, 2001, number 6,268,472 issued July 31, 2001, and number 6,287,565 issued September 11, 2001.

Dr. Dan Zimmerman, CEL-SCI, and inventor of the technology said, "The L.E.A.P.S. technology allows for the preparation of novel immunotherapeutic agents that can target specific types of immune cells and elicit the most appropriate responses (cellular or humoral) for that disease. In this case, we took a peptide, HGP-30, that has been shown to induce protective immune responses in the hu-SCID mouse/human HIV-1 challenge model and improved the antigen by making it more ...