Argos Therapeutics today announced the publication of a manuscript in
the February edition of Clinical Immunology, detailing positive
immune response, safety and manufacturing data for its AGS-004
immunotherapy for HIV. AGS-004 is a product of the Company’s Arcelis™
technology, and is a personalized, RNA-loaded dendritic cell-based
immunotherapy that is perfectly matched to each patient’s unique HIV
viral burden. The manuscript details a clinical study in which AGS-004
was evaluated in type-1 HIV-infected adults who were being treated with
antiretroviral therapy (ART). The study demonstrated that AGS-004 is
capable of producing a proliferative T cell response to HIV-1 antigens
in patients, with full or partial HIV-specific proliferative immune
responses occurring in 78% of evaluable subjects.
“While ART improves the morbidity and mortality associated with HIV, it
does not improve the immune system’s ability to control HIV replication,
and it is also associated with significant side effects for patients”
“While ART improves the morbidity and mortality associated with HIV, it
does not improve the immune system’s ability to control HIV replication,
and it is also associated with significant side effects for patients,”
said Principal Investigator Jean-Pierre Routy, M.D., from McGill
University Health Centre in Montreal. “A new treatment strategy is
needed that could potentially limit or delay exposure to ART and its
accompanying side effects, and I believe that an immunotherapeutic
approach may be able to achieve this, through producing or enhancing the
anti-HIV immune responses needed to control viral replication.”
Charles Nicolette, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President of
Research and Development of Argos Therapeutics, added, “We are excited
about the Arcelis immunotherapy platform because it is so well suited to
the pathology of HIV infection; it overcomes the viral variability and
the immune suppressive mechanisms that allow the virus to persist
chronically and, remarkably, this is achieved without activation of CD4+
T cells, which are known to serve as factories for viral replication.
This current study confirms previous proof-of-concept studies that have
shown that our approach is able to induce a diverse immune response to
HIV in patients.”