Small Business Grant Given for Recurrent Sarcoma Vaccine

MabVax Therapeutics Inc., a biotechnology company in San Diego, California received a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The grant will support a Phase II clinical trial with 134 metastatic sarcoma — cancer of connective or supportive tissue — patients in a randomized, multicenter, double-blind study of a vaccine developed to target and kill residual circulating cancer cells and micrometastases thought to cause recurrent cancer.

In the United States, according to MabVax Therapeutics, about 13,200 sarcoma cases are diagnosed each year, less than 1 percent of all new cancers, but with more than 5,200 patients in the U.S. dying of the disease each year.  As in other malignancies, disease recurrence and metastasis are common in sarcoma.  Despite undergoing potentially curative surgical resection or combination therapy, the majority of these patients with recurrent sarcoma die as a result of further recurrences.

The grant was awarded under NCI’s Streamlined Non-competing Award Procedures, where both initial and follow-on grant requests are submitted and evaluated as one request.  The initial grant award of $150,000 supports the manufacture and testing of the company’s sarcoma vaccine. The follow-on grant application, for more than $1.5 million, can be funded under fast-track procedures following normal NCI reporting and review procedures.

The MabVax sarcoma vaccine, currently in clinical testing, was first developed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) where preclinical and early clinical development work was completed in 2009.  MabVax licensed the sarcoma vaccine, along with additional vaccines targeting other neuroectodermal and epithelial cancers, from MSKCC in 2008.