Israel

Israeli Vaccine: Stops Cancer from Coming Back..

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An Israeli company is developing a new cancer drug which aims to stop cancer from coming back.

Every year millions of people are diagnosed with cancer worldwide. Although modern medicine has made huge progress in treating this disease, what often happens is that the cancer is treated and the patient goes into remission or is even “cured” – but then it becomes a waiting game to see if the cancer comes back.

Imagine if there was a new treatment option that would stop cancer from returning!

An Israeli medical team is attempting to do just that, to offer a new treatment with the potential for long-term maintenance – to stop the cancer from coming back.

Vaxil is a clinical stage biotechnology company based in Israel which develops therapeutic vaccines to treat cancer and infectious diseases. Therapeutic vaccines seek to harness the patient’s immune system to attack and destroy cancer cells.

The therapeutic vaccine educates the immune system to seek out and destroy those cells which display cancer “markers” and to leave the healthy cells untouched. This means that the treatment has very few side effects, unlike other conventional treatments. This safety profile also means that it is suitable for long-term maintenance therapy.

Vaxil’s lead product, ImMucin, aims to teach the immune system of the cancer patient to attack those cancer cells which display the protein “MUC1″. Since MUC1 appears on 90% of all cancer cellss, ImMucin has a potentially broad application to many different strands of cancer such as lung, breast, kidney, prostate, ovarian, pancreatic and colon cancer – and even to hematological cancers such as leukemia, lymphomas and myeloma.

ImMucin is currently being evaluated in a Phase I/II clinical trial in patients with Multiple Myeloma (a blood cancer). All patients enrolled are in a stage process whereby the disease is coming back after a period of remission.

The clinical trial is being conducted at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem and at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa.

The trial is expected to be completed by the end of the year, and will involve 15 patients. Future trials are planned in Israel and abroad and will have larger number of participants.

Interim results on half of the trial subjects enrolled (7 out of 15 patients) were released last April and were very encouraging. There were no serious side effects and all ImMucin-treated patients induced a strong immune response.

Moreover, out of the seven patients analyzed, three re-attained a stage of complete response, meaning that the disease progression was stopped and there was no longer any detectable cancer.  Final results from this trial are expected at the beginning of next year. The team is also conducting a follow up study of patients who have completed their treatment with ImMucin and do not require further treatments.

Vaxil’s founder and CEO is Lior Carmon, PhD., MBA.  Dr. Carmon is an expert in the fields of immunology and cancer. After earning his PhD from the Weizmann Institute, Dr. Carmon founded and managed several Israeli biotech companies.  He was joined by Julian Levy M.A., who acts as Vaxil’s President and CFO. Mr. Levy is a Cambridge educated lawyer, who immigrated to Israel England and is a seasoned biotechnology entrepreneur with extensive experience in early stage biotech companies.

Dr. Carmon notes that  “A key advantage of Vaxil’s vaccines is that they can induce a comprehensive and divest immune response without need for an adaptation to the individual’s type of immune systems. Every patient has a unique immune system.  Thus, many therapeutic vaccines are suitable only for a proportion of the potential patient population. Results obtain so far has shown that ImMucin can initiate strong and diversified immune response in all patients, irrespective of their immune system. This is not trivial.” Moreover, unlike many other products “our vaccines are design to try and deal with the tumor’s tendency to evade the immune response. We believe that this is a critical factor for success.”

Although Vaxil’s main interest is therapeutic vaccines, its research team has shown that the scope of the company’s VaxHit technology is very broad and may include new areas such as diagnostics. Earlier this year the company published an article describing the discovery of naturally generated antibodies in cancer patients with myeloma.  By detecting and following the levels of these antibodies, it may be possible to determine the likelihood of patients developing cancer in the future.

Source: http://unitedwithisrael.org

Israel Revolutionizes Liver Disease Treatment.

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Israeli scientists are developing a treatment for people suffering from liver disease.

Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is a  “silent” liver disease which affects two to five percent of Americans – approximately six to fifteen million people.  Another ten to twenty percent of Americans, thirteen to twenty three million people, have fat in their livers but have not yet developed NASH.  Tens of millions of people around the world also are at risk of suffering from NASH.

The US National Institutes of Health explains:  ”It resembles alcoholic liver disease, but occurs in people who drink little or no alcohol.  The major feature in NASH is fat in the liver, along with inflammation and damage.  Most people with NASH feel well and are not aware that they have a liver problem.  Nevertheless, NASH can be severe and can lead to cirrhosis, in which the liver is permanently damaged and scarred and no longer able to work properly.”

Currently the only treatments for NASH are available in injection (hypodermic needle) form.  The problem with injections is that the treatments must first go through the bloodstream and then into the liver.

The Solution

NasVax, an Israeli company based in Ness-Ziona, is forging new ground in developing a treatment for people suffering from NASH.  The CEO of NasVax is Guy Yachin, a seasoned MBA graduate from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the research and development is lead by Dr. Ronald Ellis, who holds a Ph.D. in Biology from Cornell University.  The team in Israel realized that an oral treatment would be much more effective because it can go directly to the intestinal system and into the liver and they developed a drink to suppress the disease.  The drink, an Oral anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody (aCD3 MAb) immunotherapy is currently directed toward the treatment of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, and is in Phase 2A clinical studies on patients.  Research shows that the patients are doing better than patients who are taking traditional treatments.

Dr. Ellis estimates that the treatment will be available to the public in seven to eight years.  He cautions that there are many factors in a clinical studies, so an exact timeline cannot yet be set.  For example, the team is working on converting the drink into tablet (pill) form but this will require a lot of testing to reach the same effectiveness as the drink.  He also explains that drinks and tablets also have side benefits. “Traditional injection treatments for NASH often have negative side effects.  But we do not see these side-effects with our treatment.”  In addition, “Traditional injection treatments are not easy for patients.  People do not like going to a clinic once a week or once a month.  It is easier to take a pill from the pharmacy.”

Innovation Nation

CEO Guy Yachin explains “NasVax has a history of taking research from universities and small companies.  We look for opportunities at early states.  Of our four major products, all began in biotech start-ups or universities.  There is a lot of innovation in Israel, and we can tap it.  Then we develop it for clinical trials and commercialization.”

Mr. Yachin explains how NesVax fills a gap between the early start–up and large corporations.  “We bring medical treatments into Phase 2 Clinical Trials.  Then we look for a partner who has the resources to put the treatments into the finals states of clinical trials.  These are usually large pharmaceutical or biotechnological corporations with deep resources.”

Dr. Ellis describes how he was drawn to immunology.  “I have been vaccines and immunotherapeutics for over thirty years.  What motivates me to continue?  I want to benefit humanity and prevent suffering.”

CEO Guy Yachin describes business innovation in Israel:  ”My background is in engineering and business.  I was attracted to the medical devices field.  Eventually, I shifted my career to biotech.  I love the opportunity to do something good, and to develop something that is unique with a talented group of people.”

Yachin adds, “We are in the US and Israel.  Most of our research and development is in Israel.  We have been listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange since December 2005.”

Dr. Ellis describes what makes Israeli biotechnology companies unique. “Israeli companies are much more cost effective and move rapidly.  We use financial resource with more focus than American companies. Israeli biotechnology companies have limited resources compared to their counterparts in the US.  We do a lot more outsourcing, and spend most of our time managing other companies.  For example we know that other companies can do many functions better and at a lower cost than if we did everything on our own.  When we need to produce an antibody, run clinical trials, or sequence a DNA molecule, we find a firm that is an exert in that function.”

Source: http://unitedwithisrael.org

 

Should Men Be Allowed to Father Children After They’re Dead?

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Fertility-treatment innovations mean that all sorts of people who would not have been able to have a baby a generation ago are now able to bring life into the world. Now, some are arguing the ranks of the newly fertile should include dead people.

In Australia, a woman was granted permission last month to use her dead husband’s sperm in an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) attempt to create a child. In Israel, grieving grandparents are petitioning a court to allow them to use their dead son’s sperm to conceive a grandchild. And in California, a woman is due in three months with her husband’s child — even though her husband died not long before she got pregnant.

The rules of post-humous baby-making are only now being written, but it’s a dicey undertaking because individual situations vary so widely. It’s not uncommon for soldiers on the brink of a dangerous deployment to freeze sperm so that their wives can have a child should they die. And patients diagnosed with cancer are increasingly turning to fertility preservation to ensure they can become parents. But what happens when the patient dies, as in the California case in which the husband froze sperm prior to cancer treatment and indicated his desire for his wife to bear his child? And how to rule on the Israeli grandparents’ quest for a grandchild from their son who was injured last year and died after two weeks in a coma?

“That’s much less straightforward,” says Theresa Erickson, the San Diego attorney for the pregnant California woman. “Creating a grandchild is much different than creating a child. Imagine what the child will think: My dad’s dead and he never even knew I existed. It’s a pretty sticky ethical and moral dilemma.”

Erickson’s client had little problem gaining access to her husband’s sperm; a California law governing the posthumous use of sperm requires a fetus be in utero within two years of the death, assuming the donor gave consent before he died. Erickson is petitioning for her client’s husband’s name to be listed on the birth certificate.

In Israel, 27-year-old Ohad Ben-Yaakov wasn’t married or in a committed relationship. But his parents, Mali and Dudi Ben-Yaakov, had his sperm extracted and are waiting for a ruling from the country’s attorney general to find out whether they can use IVF to impregnate a surrogate with his child. “If we were entitled to donate the organs of our son why are we not entitled to make use of his sperm in order to bring offspring to the world?” they asked in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.

Israel is already IVF-crazy; health insurance pays for as many IVF cycles as needed to achieve the birth of up to two babies. In 2003, it codified guidelines surrounding posthumous reproduction that allow a spouse or partner to use a dead man’s sperm unless he had specified that was unacceptable.

“This notion of presumed consent, that we can assume that a man would want to have genetic children after his death, that was really pushing the envelope at the time in comparison with other countries,” says Vardit Ravitsky, an Israeli-born assistant professor in the Bioethics Programs at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Medicine. But the ministry refused to allow a man’s mother or father similar access, concluding that parents have no legal standing regarding their children’s fertility, “[n]ot in their lifetime, and certainly not when they are dead.”

In Australia, Jocelyn Edwards and her husband, Mark, were on the brink of signing the paperwork to commence fertility treatment when he was killed last year in a work accident. Although it’s illegal to use sperm without donor consent in New South Wales, where they lived, a judge ruled in favor of Edwards, who had the support of her late husband’s parents and siblings.

“Mark would be so happy,” Edwards said outside the court, according to the Daily Telegraph. “We’re going to have our baby.”

Related Topics: IVF, posthumous sperm donation, Pregnancy, sperm donor, sperm extraction, Family & Parenting, Infertility
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/03/should-men-be-allowed-to-father-children-after-theyre-dead/#ixzz22ye1Aa4c

 

Source: http://healthland.time.com