Advaxis Inc. (ADXS) gains more than 6% after presentation
Posted on: April 18th, 2011Written by:
Advaxis Inc. (OTCBB: ADXS) enjoyed a healthy gain of 6.3% Monday afternoon, after one of its chief scientists gave a presentation at a prestigious conference. The New Jersey-based vaccine company gained a penny in late Monday trading to 16.9 cents, still far short of its 52-week high of 25 cents posted last May, on volume of nearly 600,000 shares.
Over the weekend, Advaxis Executive Vice President of Science and Operations Dr. John Rothman, spoke about “The Use of Live Attenuated Listeria that Express LLO-Antigen Fusion Proteins for the Treatment of Cancer” in a Target Meeting webinar entitled “Immunotherapy: a promising way for cancer treatment.”
In his presentation, he reported that Advaxis has treated 72 patients with 180 doses of live attenuated Listeria safely, to-date; that drug-related side effects have been infrequent and are typically mild to moderate when they occur. Rothman also noted that, when side effects have occurred, they have been treated symptomatically and have not required antibiotics – indicating that the side effects are not related to the onset of Listerial disease but result from strong innate immune stimulation which causes a flu-like syndrome of fever and chills and occasionally nausea.
“What we witnessed in the clinic confirms the data in the laboratory,” Dr. Rothman told the scientific audience. “We have developed strains of Listeria that can be given to mice in doses 100,000 times greater than the normally lethal levels of the wild type bacterium without any animals dying. Our experience with end-stage cancer patients using our attenuated Listeria indicates that they can be given safely even to those who have very weakened immune systems.”
Based in North Brunswick, New Jersey, Advaxis is a biotechnology company developing proprietary, live but attenuated, Listeria monocytogenes (Listeria) vaccines that deliver engineered tumor antigens, which stimulate multiple, simultaneous immunological mechanisms to fight cancer. Advaxus’ platform technology was developed by Dr. Yvonne Paterson at The University of Pennsylvania. Today, the Company has over nine distinct, cancer-fighting constructs in various stages of development.
