PersImmune, Inc. believes that no cancer patient should be excluded from treatment. Our technology produces a customized cell therapy that is specifically tailored to treat each patient’s unique cancer.
PersImmune’s proprietary technology (1) exploits the fact that tumor cells harbor unique changes (mutations) in their DNA sequences and (2) leverages the power of immune cells to seek out and destroy tumor cells expressing proteins encoded by the mutated DNA. An ideal immunotherapy should kill cancer cells but leave normal cells untouched. PersImmune’s technology is able to achieve this ideal because the immune system can very precisely distinguish between normal and mutated proteins; in some cases, the difference between a tumor cell and a normal cell may be a single amino acid.
We now know that the DNA of all cancers carries mutations that give rise to mutated proteins, referred to as “neoantigens” because they were not present before the tumor developed. We also know that many of the tumor neoantigens are able to induce a response by the immune system, specifically, by cytotoxic or “killer” T cells. However, in cancer patients, the tumor-specific T cell response is suppressed by factors released by the tumor itself and by regulatory mechanisms that control the patient’s own immune system.
Most importantly, the tumor-killing activity of the T cells can be unleashed by removing them from the patient–and the suppressive tumor environment–and then growing (culturing) the T cells in the laboratory. T cells that recognize and kill the patient’s tumor cells can be selected from the cultures and grown to large numbers.