Swedish biotech crumbles in face of PhII failure of prostate cancer vaccine

31 May 2022
endpts.com
VaccineAcquisitionmRNA
Swedish biotech RhoVac saw its shares plummet by 90% Monday after its lead cancer vaccine candidate failed a Phase II study. In approximately 180 patients, the treatment did not stop progression of prostate cancer compared to placebo in patients who showed signs of cancer recurrence. The biotech did not sugarcoat the news, saying in its press release that “the primary outcome analysis obviously offers little hope of a license or acquisition deal based on the results of this study alone.” In follow-up analysis, the company hopes that it may be able to find a patient subgroup that may benefit from its lead candidate. “That could either happen within RhoVac or another biotech company, but it would not be a Phase III-ready asset, so it’s a different scale of course,” RhoVac CEO Anders Månsson told Endpoints News . By stopping the study, the company eliminated most of its costs, Månsson noted, adding that RhoVac functions as mostly a “virtual biotech.” RhoVac’s shares dropped from 35 kr to just over 2 kr (from $3.56 to $0.20) after the company announced the Phase II fail. The biotech had built their vaccine around prevention. Rather than treating late-stage tumors, by starting early, RhoVac had hoped its therapy could prevent metastatic tumors due to prostate cancer from forming, Månsson said. Thus far, therapeutic cancer vaccines have yet to succeed in the market. In 2010, Dendreon won approval for its cancer vaccine for metastatic prostate cancer, the same indication that RhoVac is trying to prevent, but Dendreon eventually went bankrupt in 2014 after its therapeutic vaccine Provenge underperformed as a result of its high production costs and limited efficacy compared to other treatments. However, on the heels of their Covid-19 vaccine successes, BioNTech and Regeneron are looking to use their mRNA technology in therapeutic vaccines for multiple cancers, including prostate cancer. Last year, BioNTech also began a Phase II trial for a vaccine to prevent recurrence of colorectal cancer. RhoVac was founded in 2007 and is named after its lead candidate, a cancer vaccine that targets cells with a protein known as RhoC, which is overexpressed in metastatic tumors.
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