Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Inc.
This article was originally published in Start Up
Executive Summary
Bellicum Pharmaceuticals is developing a therapeutic vaccine for late-stage prostate cancer. The start-up believes that one of the reasons vaccines have floundered in the clinic may be negative feedback loops that desensitize the vaccine before it's had a chance to work. Bellicum's autologous vaccine is designed to avoid that. Its dimerizer agent is injected 24 hours after the vaccine, giving the dendritic cells time to migrate to draining lymph nodes before activation. When therapeutic vaccine cells are stimulated ex-vivo, they begin releasing key cytokines, such as IL-12, immediately.