Empowered Patient Podcast Developing Prophylactic Cancer Vaccine to Attack Breast Cancer and Other Solid Tumors with Amit Kumar Anixa Biosciences
Amit Kumar is the President and CEO of Anixa Biosciences and is working on a prophylactic vaccine to prevent the onset of breast cancer rather than a therapeutic vaccine to fight the solid tumors. Anixa is also working on CAR-T therapy for solid tumors and using artificial intelligence and machine learning to discover compounds to treat COVID-19.
Amit elaborates, "We believe that trying to destroy cancer cells as they arise in a patient's body is much easier than waiting until that cancer becomes a large tumor mass with trillions of cells. As you know, cancer starts off with one single cell that becomes aberrant. Then it reproduces, it becomes two cells, four cells, eight cells, and so on, eventually becoming a tumor that is comprised of millions to trillions of cells. So if we try and destroy a tumor that's millions and trillions of cells, it's very difficult."
"You have a tumor microenvironment, you have a very immunosuppressive environment in that tumor, and it's very hard to address that tumor. However, if you could destroy those cells as they arise at the two-cell, four-cell, or handful-of-cell stage, then you could eliminate the tumor from ever arising. The cells never have a chance to become a tumor. That's what we're trying to do with our breast cancer vaccine."
"This is a therapeutic as opposed to a vaccine against coronavirus. We believe that the coronavirus is going to be an endemic disease, and there will always be a need for therapeutics. We want to be able to have a therapeutic that can be easily distributed, it's room-temperature-stable, unlike the vaccines, which require a cold chain, and something very inexpensive that can be taken by mouth."
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