Aavocyte
Bringing Immunotherapy for Solid Tumors

Solid tumor--a complex and dynamic mass composed of rogue host cells--is one of the common types of cancers that take millions of lives in the United States alone. Cell immunotherapy is a very promising technology for the treatment of tumors. Among immune cells, T cell is the most promising one. About 90% of ongoing cell immunotherapy trials are T cell immunotherapy. Unfortunately, none of the current technologies including the T cell immunotherapies approved by FDA are very effective on solid tumors. Even though scientists are carrying out intensive research to make T cells to treat solid tumors effectively, there are no satisfactory results reported yet. Add to that, the traditional method and treatment modalities of solid tumor are costly in time, in money, in resource, and many cases in the patient’s well-being.

With a mission to restore normal function of T cell immune system for solid tumor patients, Aavocyte, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical start-up company, has developed a unique precise targeting rAAV delivery platform, AAVOT. Registered in October 2019, the company has been focusing on developing various T cell immune therapy products to treat solid tumors.

It all began in the late nineties when Dr. Yong Liu started his research on T cell therapy while doing research at the University of Arkansas. He developed the original concept for the treatment and accomplished basic research. Attracted by the favorable regulation in China, he went back to China and directly apply his technology to clinical practice and achieved an instant success. Based on 10+ years of clinical practice, Dr. Liu revolutionized the technology, created a more advanced delivery platform with the feature of precise delivering and co-founded Aavocyte in US.

“AAVOT is a Precise-Targeting rAAV delivery platform technology,” says Dr. Liu, CTO of Aavocyte. He further explains, “Its early version was a ‘non-precise targeting rAAV delivery platform’ and it has achieved satisfactory results on safety and efficacy through 10,000+ treatments of solid cancers in China. That provided us with reliable guidance for developing the new version products in the US to achieve much better clinical results. Therefore, different from a typical startup, the company has very low risk in product development.”

T Cell Immunotherapy with Full Immune Function Created in vitro

In general, biotechnology is to imitate or restore the natural function in human body to deal with or cure diseases. The T cell immunotherapy is to restore the normal immune function of T cells. Commonly, the body inner environment of a patient, especially of an advanced cancer patient, becomes not in favor to resuming chain reaction of T cell immune system, so that imitating in vitro can avoid a lot of uncertainties in restoring T cell immune system.

Our technology has been applied on 10,000 patients for 20 indications of solid tumors for 10 years

In the process of fighting against tumor cells, the most important role of the human immune system is T cell response, which is produced through a chain of reactions illustrated in the figure below.

AAVOT uses recombinant adenoassociated viruses (rAAV) as the delivery platform to imitate the whole chain of T cell immune response in vitro under GMP. The DC-stimulated CTL have the same robust function as those created naturally. Due to the same reason, the results of AAVOT treatments show that the tumor blood vessels were destroyed when CTL kill the tumor cells. This is a unique feature and not aware of from other clinical reports.

Provenge was the first immunotherapy approved by FDA. It uses target antigen protein to stimulate DCs in vitro and then the stimulated DC are infused back to patients, letting the last immune reaction naturally happen in vivo. However, no satisfactory clinical results have been achieved as the reaction is very likely poor due to a non-ideal environment (Patient’s body). With respect to CAR-T & TCR-T, artificial T cells are made with the technologies to directly endow the power to seek and destroy tumor cells. What is still challenging is that CAR-T & TCR-T are not very effective on solid tumors because those artificial T cells may miss some critical immune functions.

Taking advantage of 10+ years of accumulated experience in deploying the rAAV platform and improving its functionality, Aavocyte developed a library of rAAV vectors with identified antigens ready to use on solid tumors. Aavocyte believes that the AAVOT is the safest and proven technology available in the market to date. “It is one of the most powerful solutions for most solid tumors and is available at an affordable price,” says Dr. Liu. “We provide a very effective and targeted killing effect on the tumor with very little side effects to the patient and we think this is a paradigm shift in cancer therapy, something that sets us apart dramatically from all the others that are out there.”

By the nature of platform technology, the application fields of AAVOT are very broad. Like any new technology, it is about managing and prioritizing resources and technology. The firm is currently focusing on product development for solid tumors. The platform can be easily extended into other fields such as autoimmune diseases, genetic diseases, and infectious diseases.

“We are open minded to collaborate with researchers and other entities to best utilize our platform. We think that while researchers and companies are busy squeezing existing immunotherapies for incremental improvements (think CAR-T or TCR-T) for a few more months on average, we are contemplating years and cures,” ends Dr. Liu.