ImmunoCellular Therapeutics, in collaboration with Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility at the University of Pennsylvania, has developed a new method for manufacturing its product candidate, ICT-107, a dendritic cell-based vaccine for the treatment of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).

ImmunoCellular said that the new method employs a closed-bag system designed to produce highly potent dendritic cells from white blood cells collected from patients, and for subsequently cryopreserving the dendritic cells for future vaccine treatments.

ImmunoCellular claimed that the process may be used to produce 20 or more doses of ICT-107 vaccine from a single blood collection, which may be frozen and later used for vaccination and maintenance of immune response in patients until disease recurrence.

ImmunoCellular Therapeutics president and CEO Manish Singh said that the validated method they have optimised for producing 20 or more doses of dendritic cell-based vaccine from a single blood collection presents cost and convenience advantages over current manufacturing methods, as patients should be able to be treated for several years from a single manufacturing run.

"For example, Provenge, another dendritic cell-based vaccine approved for prostate cancer, is manufactured one dose at a time, contributing to its expensive treatment cost," Singh said.

"We continue to conduct analyses on the per-dose manufacturing-cost savings of this new method as we prepare to initiate a Phase II study of ICT-107 in GBM in the fourth quarter of this year."