Nobel Prize chemistry used by CancerVax to attain universal cancer vaccine targeting milestone

CancerVax, the developer of  cancer drugs that will use the body’s immune system to fight cancer, announced that its UCLA research team has achieved a critical milestone by creating a process to add any antibody to lipid nanoparticles (LNP) using “click chemistry”, for targeting cancer cells. 

Click chemistry is a revolutionary approach to chemical synthesis that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022. It is characterised by high efficiency, high reliability, and simplicity in making precise molecular structures, such as LNPs, quickly and cost-effectively. In other words, you “click” together what you need and not anything else. The current approach to manufacturing LNPs uses imprecise melamine chemistry where unwanted materials end up in the final product, leading to toxicity and low efficiency.

The LNP is the vehicle that carries the functional cargoes of the company’s Universal Cancer Vaccine (“UCV”) to precisely detect, mark and kill cancer cells. UCV uses multiple targeting signals to detect cancer cells with precision, as opposed to the conventional single signal targeting. By using click chemistry, the UCLA team has successfully created a customisable precision LNP architecture where various antibodies can be “clicked” onto the outside. These antibodies only bind to matching proteins (aka antigens) on the cancer cell surface like a lock-and-key mechanism. Once attached to the cell surface, the LNP would then enter the cancer cell and release additional UCV molecules that perform additional matching inside the cell to confirm that the cell is in fact a cancer cell. This multi-signal targeting is the very foundation of UCV’s high precision targeting of cancer cells.