Preclinical Results Are Promising.(Brief Article)

2001 DEC 26 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- CEL-SCI Corporation announced researchers have demonstrated that animals given CEL-SCI's experimental L.E.A.P.S.-based HIV vaccine agent showed strong evidence supporting the induction of cellular immune responses and antibodies, both of which recognize different strains of the HIV virus.

Potentially even more important to the field of vaccine research is the finding that, even after repeat administration, only minimal immune responses were developed against the delivery peptides used by the L.E.A.P.S. technology (called a T-cell binding ligand), while strong immune responses were elicited against the HIV portion of the peptide. This may indicate that, unlike other epitope delivery technologies currently being developed, the immune response induced by these L.E.A.P.S. constructs is focused on the disease epitope, as opposed to the carrier or delivery parts, and that such constructs are more likely to be suitable for long-term administration in infected patients.

Daniel Zimmerman, CEL-SCI, and inventor of the technology said, "Treatment vaccines are thought to represent a whole new way of treating patients in the future. The problem with the required repeat administration of the vaccines often is that the body will develop a strong immune response against parts of the vaccine that are only needed for the presentation of the vaccine to the immune system. This is undesirable for the patients' health. Our L.E.A.P.S. technology may remove that obstacle."

The study was published in the journal Vaccine (2001;19(32):4750-4759).

Other delivery technologies for peptide epitopes, such as KLH, Heat Shock Proteins (HSP), VP22 (herpes simplex virus protein 22 kDa), AutoVac, LEif, recombinant viral vectors, and virus-like particles (VLP), have the major disadvantage of using large, very immunogenic molecules. Immunotherapeutic agents utilizing these technologies may at best be administered a limited number of times without adverse immune ...