Argos Therapeutics Initiate Personalized Immunotherapy Clinical Trial in HIV Patients
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Argos Therapeutics has announced the initiation of a Phase 1/2 clinical trial to test the immunologic activity and safety of its AGS-004 in HIV-infected adults.
The target population for the study is patients with durable viral suppression from highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). AGS-004 is a personalized RNA-loaded dendritic cell-based immunotherapy that is designed to stimulate the patient’s immune system to target and destroy the patient’s own unique viral burden.
“Non-personalized HIV immunotherapies are unable to raise cytotoxic T lymphocytes against HIV antigens, fail to induce T cell memory, and, most importantly, do not provide antiviral protection against the patient’s own particular virus,” said Jean-Pierre Routy, M.D., of McGill University Health Center and Royal Victoria Hospital, the principle investigator and sponsor of the study.
“A personalized immunotherapy addresses these issues because it is able to capture private viral mutations, providing a matched, complete immune response for each individual HIV patient. This approach may overcome the weaknesses of other available therapies and therefore could result in a better chance of success for HIV treatment,” said Routy.
“We believe that this important milestone demonstrates Argos’ leadership in the development of RNA-loaded dendritic cell-based immunotherapies,” said John N. Bonfiglio, Ph.D., President and CEO of Argos.
“With two other clinical trials ongoing in metastatic renal cell carcinoma and B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia, our next-generation technology is applicable to a broad array of indications and may present a potentially paradigm-shifting treatment method for infectious diseases and cancer,” he continued.
