TVAX Platform

TVAX Immunotherapy® is a unique personalized combination of cancer cell vaccination and “killer” T cell treatment platform that is built upon more than 50 years of intensive scientific and medical research into the interactions between cancer and the immune system.  This novel, proprietary immunotherapy platform has demonstrated the potential to effectively treat numerous cancers with very low toxicity, potentially offering a paradigm shift in the systemic treatment of cancer.

The key distinction between TVAX and other cancer immunotherapy companies is that TVAX Immunotherapy uses BOTH cancer vaccine pretreatment to generate cancer-specific T cells AND activated “killer” T cell treatment – this proprietary combination has demonstrated significant efficacy.

TVAX® is working to strengthen the natural ability of the human immune system to strategically attack and eradicate cancer.  On its own, the human immune system selectively and permanently eliminates foreign pathogens such as viruses without causing any permanent harm to the body. While the body`s immune system has evolved to eliminate microbial threats invading from the environment, it does not recognize cancerous threats that arise from within our body. The challenge for scientists working in the field of immunology is to train the body`s immune system to eliminate both the external and internal threats - and to turn that ability into a safe cancer treatment.

T cells have been scientifically proven to be the mediators of cancer immunity. Accordingly, treating cancer patients with high numbers of activated cancer specific killer T cells is a scientifically logical immunotherapeutic strategy.

The TVAX platform is dependent on two essential steps, each of which has been shown to be scientifically viable:

1. Vaccinate the patient with their own cancer cells combined with a powerful immunological adjuvant to generate an immune response against their own cancer.  Vaccination is a medical intervention that produces high numbers of partially activated cancer specific T cells in the patient’s blood.  Those cancer specific T cells can recognize cancer cells but cannot kill them.
2. Harvest cancer specific T cells generated by vaccination from the patient’s blood, use those cells to produce high numbers of activated "killer" T cells capable of killing cancer cells and then deliver those T cells back into the patient by IV infusion.

While both approaches are necessary, neither on its own is sufficient to generate a meaningful therapeutic benefit for the patient.

TVAX has developed and optimized processes for each of these steps and incorporated them into its proprietary immunotherapy platform.

To date, TVAX®’s approach to cancer immunotherapy has generated extensive preclinical and clinical data demonstrating efficacy against a wide variety of cancer types while at the same time producing very little toxicity compared to other cancer treatment strategies. 

The company’s two most advanced clinical programs, TVI-Brain-1 and TVI-Kidney-1, are supported by positive Phase 2 clinical data, as well as extensive preclinical and Phase 1 safety studies.

While the brain and kidney cancer therapies represent the company’s most advanced candidates and clinical programs, TVAX also has safety and proof of concept preclinical and human data in breast, colon, lung, melanoma and ovarian cancer. Furthermore, published literature studies have proven the applicability of the technology to leukemia, as well as pancreatic and prostate cancer.

TVAX® has established a cGMP production facility at its corporate headquarters outside of Kansas City which is supporting its clinical trials. The company has the ability to expand this manufacturing capability at the current site and has also identified a number of viable additional avenues for scaling up production to support commercialization.