Meet Anixa Biosciences: Fly exclusive interview with CEO Amit Kumar

In an exclusive interview with The Fly, Anixa Biosciences (ANIX) CEO Amit Kumar talked about the company, its pipeline, ongoing clinical trials, upcoming milestones, and much more.

TO CHANGE CANCER LANDSCAPE: Anixa is a biotechnology company focused on the treatment and prevention of cancer. Its therapeutics portfolio consists of a cancer immunotherapy program that uses a novel type of CAR-T, known as chimeric endocrine receptor T-cell, or CER-T, technology. The company’s vaccine portfolio consists of technology focused on the immunization against specific “retired” proteins associated with breast cancer, specifically triple negative breast cancer, or TNBC, and ovarian cancer. Retired proteins are proteins that are expressed at certain times in life and then are no longer expressed in healthy people.

“We’re a research and development focused company addressing a lot of unmet needs in oncology. Right now, we’ve got some programs in breast cancer and ovarian cancer but we want to do things that will change the whole cancer landscape. Unlike many companies, we’re trying to develop things that have never worked before like cancer vaccines. And if we’re successful at that, we believe that we will completely disrupt the way cancer research is done and the way the medical system evaluates and treats cancer patients,” CEO Amit Kumar explained in an exclusive interview with The Fly.

BREAST CANCER VACCINE: Earlier this month, Anixa reported new and updated results from the Phase 2 clinical trial of its breast cancer vaccine. “Anixa is working on a breast cancer vaccine specifically designed to target triple negative breast cancer, which is the most lethal form. We’ve been able to test it on 16 women. The data is looking incredibly promising. All 16 women had an immune response, meaning that after vaccination, their immune systems have been taught to destroy cancer cells,” the executive said.

“Initially, we’re focused on TNBC survivors, triple negative breast cancer survivors,” Kumar said, adding that “eventually we want to extend it to all women who’ve never had cancer to try and prevent the initial onset of cancer. One out of eight women will get breast cancer in their lives. And so, if there was a way to prevent them by just taking some shots, it would be pretty amazing.”

OVARIAN CANCER VACCINE: The company is also using a similar mechanism of action to develop a vaccine to prevent the occurrence of ovarian cancer. “That program is progressing as well. It is still in the animal stages at the current time. We hope to bring that into human testing within a year or year and a half, plus or minus. Right now, we’re doing all of the animal studies that are necessary to take it to the FDA to enable them to give us approval to begin human testing,” Kumar told The Fly.

MILESTONES: Looking out over the new year, Anixa CEO sees “a lot of upcoming milestones, more data on clinical studies.” Kumar says that, “One our goals, from a strategic standpoint, is to take our programs like this cancer vaccine and get it to a point where we have very compelling data on human beings and then partner with a pharmaceutical company to do the commercialization. We have a company focused on innovation, but our goal is to commercialize through a large partner. Primarily because the large partner has the infrastructure, they’ll have manufacturing facilities, they’ll have sales distribution, customer support, all of the things that are very expensive for small biotech companies like ours to build. We’re hoping that it happens sooner rather than later.”

NEW APPROACH: Discussing any potential misconceptions about the company and its pipeline, Anixa’s CEO told The Fly that “the industry has tried to develop vaccines for many, many years and all of them have failed. The only situation where there is a successful cancer vaccine is for cervical cancer. And other cancers that are caused by an infectious agent.”

“What we are doing is a new approach that is very different and takes advantage of the decades of knowledge that we have gained on infectious disease vaccines. In essence, we teach the human body to think of cancer cells, not as cells that came out of your own body, but as if they were a foreign invading pathogen. Because cancer vaccines have been so unsuccessful in the past, there’s always a little bit of skepticism. But now that we’re starting to show data, there are people saying, ‘hey, this could be something.'”

“Meet the Company” is The Fly’s recurring series of exclusive short interviews with Executive Officers to offer a deeper look inside the company.